Patricia Smith

From Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation's premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade-a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned celebration of poetry's liberating power.

"Michael Abramson took these photographs with the full knowledge and consent of patrons in and outside five nightclubs on Chicago's South Side during the mid-1970s. Patricia Smith used these photographs four decades later as an inspiration for her poetry...."--T.p. verso.

Janna loves the Saturday visits that she and her grandfather make to the local barbershop where she becomes a princess, but after he dies, Janna feels as though her world has changed.

"The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks's original. An array of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates, have written poems for this...

"In this wide-ranging collection of essays, stories, graphic memoir, and cross-genre work, writers explore the deeply human act of kissing." -- From book jacket.