Post by shayepoet on Sept 20, 2008 1:06:46 GMT 2
Blood Dazzler
Patricia Smith
2008 National Book Award Nominee
"This riveting sequence gives voice to a wild raw whirlwind that ruined a city and brought us, in turn, a storm of neglect and murderous indifference. With her radiant powers of empathy, her fiercely acute ear for the musical possibilities of American speech, and her undiluted rage, Paricia Smith makes in Katrina's wake
a sorrowful, unflinching, and glorious book."
--Mark Doty
Sample poem:
Looking For Bodies
I.
Slowly push the door open with your foot
because wood that has been wet for so long
gives to touch, imitates flesh.
Do not kick the door open,
no matter how weirdly your heart drums.
There may be something all wrong behind it.
Push and immediately drown
in what could be ordinary, if ordinary was
a crusted saucepan, toppled rockers,
pine framed portraits of newly
baptized babies and fathers with an overload of teeth.
Allow yourself his lunatic smile as you spy
signs of ritual and days undone--
bright ghosts of skirts and work-shirts,
or the spiraled grace of decapitated dolls
doing their blind dance, bumping your knees.
Eventually you will need these diversions.
You will lock your fractured heart upon them,
because what you will see next
will hurt you long and aloud.
A monstered smell sings her out of hiding,
and at first you believe
that one doll, plumper than the rest
and still intact,
survived the deluge,
but then you
II.
guide the gold of her into
your arms blessing the droop
and blown skin marveling
at the way her soul rides
slickly on the outside of
everything how it ripples
the water how it so deftly
damns your hands
Raves and reviews for Blood Dazzler:
"In her fifth collection, Smith, a poetry-slam champion and recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, presents towering testament to the tragedy of New Orleans before, during, and after Katrina. Her ear for voice and gift for persona poems make for a complex, colloquial, thought-provoking, and nearly minute-to-minute account of the catastrophe that captures the power of nature and the failure of leadership. Smith’s observations are painstakingly revealing and unabashedly critical, especially juxtaposed against the beauty of her terse free verse and formal sestina and rhymed sonnets. Following Teahouse of the Almighty (2006), this accomplished work reaffirms her position as one of American’s strongest and most clarion poetic voices."
--Booklist
“Spiritual and gutsy, Patricia Smith’s satirical poems lay New Orleans bare, with Katrina at the driving wheel, howling and whispering her personified moments of destruction and healing. Blood Dazzler is a document of feelings, whose tinges of the blues capture an urgent witnessing through the natural empathy embedded in praise, woe, and awe.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa
“Blood Dazzler is Patricia Smith’s impassioned lyric chronicle of a beloved city in peril, a city whose people were left to die before us all, a people who were the heart of our country and lifeblood of our culture. After rising water, winds and abandonment, after our failure and neglect, comes this symphony of utterance from the ruins: many-voiced, poignant, sorrowful and fierce. This is poetry taking the full measure of its task.”
—Carolyn Forche
*****
*****
About the author:
Chicago native Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a book of poems chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection, winner of the 2007 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. Teahouse was also voted the Best Poetry Book of 2006 by About.com.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals. She is also the author of the groundbreaking history Africans in America and the children’s book Janna and the Kings, winner of a Lee & Low Books New Voices Award. In addition, she is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.
In 2006, during a ceremony at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center of Chicago State University, she was voted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Currently, Smith is working on the young adult novel The Journey of Willie J, a verse memoir entitled Shoulda Been Jimmie Savannah and a Blood Dazzler dance/theater collaboration with Urban Bush Women choreographer Paloma McGregor.
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ISBN--978-1-56689-219-6, 77 pages, $16.00
Coffee House Press, Sept. 2008
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