Poetry Book Club: "The Intentions of Thunder" by Patricia Smith

Doug Knowlton leads a discussion of Patricia Smith’s powerful poems exploring Black history, identity, injustice, resilience, and survival. This monthly book club, led by Doug Knowlton, is for those who like to read and discuss poetry. It celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in life and literature. December's selection is The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith, a powerful collection of poems exploring history, race, identity, and the enduring legacies of violence and injustice. With her signature lyricism and electrifying language, Smith gives voice to both personal and collective experiences, illuminating the complexities of American life. We meet in person in the loft of our store in The Mark building at 117 South Pineapple Avenue. The cost is your purchase of the book, which can be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting. ABOUT THE BOOK: FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING POETRY “Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.” —The Guardian “In The Intentions of Thunder, language itself becomes weather—charged, clarifying, and resounding, a form of resurrection and survival.” —National Book Award Judges’ Citation A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard” (Poetry Foundation). The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows. Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, Patricia Smith’s poems are testimonials of American experience, from the bus north to Chicago during the Great Migration to the funeral of Emmett Till, from the waiting rooms of Boston’s prisons to New Orleans’s Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina. Few poets have so fearlessly confronted our nation as it truly is, with all its dreams and nightmares. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2018 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. A Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.