Incendiary Art: Poems

by Patricia Smith

Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category 
Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Winner, 2018 BLACA Best Poetry Award
Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Finalist, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice

One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.

 

Genres: Poetry, Race, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2017

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable book, alternately harrowing, elegiac, provocative, and inspirational, the series of poems reflecting on the Emmett Till's death and its aftermath, and its continuing legacy, particularly masterfully crafted.

[Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Deeply emotional, honest, and a tear-jerker. I read this in all one sitting, and I’m not looking forward to having to return it to the library.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incendiary Art lives up to its name. It burns and ignites passion around the continuing murder of innocent black people, particularly men. Many of the poems address the tragedy of Emmet Till; others are tributes to various individual--identified by name--who were murdered.

There is a long poem about the complicated relationship between a daughter and her father that excludes the mother in a kind of conspiracy of unbridled energy. As in many of these poems, the mother takes refuge in a kind of fevered yet simultaneously sterile religion in which calling upon the name of Jesus as a cover-up and escape from genuine feeling.

I had to pause frequently when reading these poems. Their intensity sometimes overwhelmed me but their beauty kept me going. As well as the power of the pain they depict and the indictment of our continuing racist society.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this sorrowful, enraging collection of poetry. Patricia Smith has such a way with words, every poem was incredibly tight and strong.

[Sophie Cornwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Speechless.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

The virtuosity of this masterful collection, by turns stunning and devastating, finds its apotheosis in sequences, especially a series of poems scattered throughout the book that turn the story of Emmett Till into a Choose Your Own Adventure. There's a dolorous charm in this, the way it warps time, allows us to imagine other possible outcomes of that story, before leaving us with a profound sense of history's immutability: what happened to Till is what will always be what happened to him; what makes the collection especially harrowing is that it keeps happening to other black children. The title is perfect: the book has heat and passion; it also reveals on every page Smith's beguiling command of language and form.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved her twists and turns of language and her usage and melding of the present and past. There's a section of poems regarding the deaths of Blacks at the hands of police which was moving, difficult to read, and still leaving an impression on me well after I've finished reading her book.

[Josiah Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blown away.

[Willow · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that this book has so few ratings shocks me. Patricia Smith has one of the most incredible poetic voices I've encountered in modern poetry. This is the second time I've read this work because the first left a years long impact on me.

[Henry Cansler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This amazing book was filled with mind blowing, moving, and inspired poems. I enjoyed the book so much because of how I loved each poem more the sixth or seventh time read rather that the first couple times were I had little understanding. I thought that reading this during February, black history month, made the book even better. I was listening to story behind the poems I had just read everywhere: school, home, and the television. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves high-vocabulary, meaningful, and inspiring poetry.

[D.A. Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful book, both for its craft and its conscience. Each poem is a lesson on how to respond to history, and to current events, how to let one's conscience read through the false narrative presented by those who would like to ignore the darkest parts of the American experience. Patricia Smith is a treasure.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most searingly lyric and urgent books of poetry I have ever read in my life. Patricia Smith's poems take on, in full measure, the legacy and immediacy of the abuse of Black people by the police, and the toll this takes on the survivors. An unflinching and relentlessly inventive and lyric collection of poems that stand witness and testify. I would consider this book essential reading for all Americans.

[gnarlyhiker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing. Beautiful. Lyrical. Powerful. Brutal. An honor.


**ARC/publisher/NetGalley

[Julia McDaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe I haven’t read this book before now. Absolutely brilliant.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patricia Smith is one of my favorite poets, and her 2017 collection /Incendiary Art/ includes five sonnets imagining alternate outcomes — “Choose Your Own Adventure” -style — either for the Till family or for the civil rights movement. They are astounding both as poetry and historiography.

In December 2022, Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley were awarded, posthumously, US Congressional Gold Medals. You may know Mamie changed the world in 1955 by insisting, against almost everyone’s instincts, on an open-casket funeral, revealing not only the truth of her son’s torture and murder, but the truth of American democracy. I was overwhelmed with the layered power of "If Emmett’s casket was closed instead.” There you'll read about mourners “imagining / the knotted tie, the scissored naps, those cheeks / In rakish bloom,” and imagining his hidden body with “perhaps a scrape or two”, and in place of seeing him… the mourner’s “shrieks / are tangled with an organ’s point of view.”

The collection fills your heart with the legacy of Till through the nearly seven decades since then. Tremendous compositions. Please read them.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so very glad I read these poems. These poems are powerful and grieving and true. They are poems about Emmitt Till, about the poet’s father, about Michael Brown, about black men and women who have been killed (many of them, but not all by police officers), and fathers who killed their children. These poems crackle and blaze throwing sparks into my heart and mind. Wow. Across nine pages late in the book she has an 8 word sentence that repeats. In 72 words she does a better job of communicating than I’ve done in any talk I’ve ever given. Impressive. Beautiful.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulled at random from the pile, this was a book for the moment... and yet the incendiary thing is that there has been moment upon moment upon moment. Fortunately this is poetry that is not 'merely' worthy of subject but superbly crafted. It's all heartbreaking: whether it is the poems about Emmet Till, and Choose Your Own Adventure, the relentless 'Accidental' sequence of police 'helping black people fall down', the special ghastliness of the black fathers killing their own little daughters, and the beautiful personal poem about the poet's own father, mother and childhood.

[Khepre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m in the minority truly with a three star review. Nonetheless, what really drove me to the three star review was the Emmett Till choose your own adventure. I understand what the author convey somewhat, but in a particular field where words have power, I feel like you have to be somewhat careful with the use of Emmett Till and calling his tragic death a “choose your own adventure,” to convey meaning of race in America. I genuinely feel that there are other avenues that the author could have chosen that are not rooted in the tragedy of Emmett Till.

[Br. Thanasi (Thomas) Stama · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second reading of this work since it came out last year. Timely subject.

We as a nation should read this volume and ponder the reality African Americans are facing.

I cannot say enough about the poetry of Patricia Smith!!! Have been following her works since 1991. I believe she is our greatest living poet in the United States of America. She is right up there with Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.

[Sara Cannilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book! I was able to buy a copy of this book after a reading from the author. She signed the copy and wrote “May the voices here inspire you to raise your own.” The way Smith delivers stories through her poetry is compelling yet consumable. It delivers the message with power but is not too complex to create a barrier for readers. One of my favorite lines in the book is on page 106. “Murder helps you sleep at night. Murder keeps me up at night, thinking of you asleep at night.”

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible volume. On the surface, and a bit beneath, these poems are concerned with violence against Black bodies. Going deeper, the book is all about love towards those Black folks in and beyond their bodies, and love toward humanity in general. A truly remarkable work. Complex, long, and enduring.

[Kelsey Bryan-Zwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poems will light your heart on fire. Every word is perfect and tragic and opens consciousness wide to inherited trauma amidst the current trauma that is racism and specifically racism in America. These words are bold filled with blood but most importantly feeling--widening the readers ability towards sympathy.

[avery! · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege of meeting Ms Smith and talking with her about her craft as well as head her read some of her poetry. It is very rare that a poet can transcend race, boundary, religion, and history to touch a person and Ms Smith is that poet. Her words and her person resonates with every story she tells. If you never read another book of poetry again, at least read this one.

[Michael Ferraro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bracing, bitter, brazen, bullet blasts to the brain. Smith writes with heart and passion, yet also with cool, profound detachment, with numb irony and surreal, savage sarcasm. Her poetry exposes the raw wounds that America prefers to ignore, redressing crimes of humanity with grace and fury.

[Alicia Monroe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smith’s poems are so visceral. I could see and feel everything she described. The way she uses language is just mindblowingly GOOD. These poems are intense and about a heavy subject matter that is very present in our every day lives.

[Jennifer Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t actually finish this book because I had to return it to the library but it was an amazing and intense and deeply impactful book of poetry honoring the killings and death of Black people. It was a gift to have the opportunity to read, while difficult and emotional.

[Zara Jamshed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these poems wrecked me, were great examples of effective docupoetics, there was just too much here. It doesn’t keep momentum throughout the whole collection. There are a few books in this book.

[Erin (roostercalls) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crucial reading, beautiful art.

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Kate Kosek · Rating 5 out of 5]

powerful and sad