Incendiary Art
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WINNER:
2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
2018 NAACP Image Award
2018 Black Caucus /American Library Assn.
Best Poetry Award
FINALIST:
2018 Pulitzer Prize
Neustadt International Prize in Literature
“Smith exhibits razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities that give her scenes a cinematic flair and her lines a momentum that buoys their emotional weight. Smith’s urgent collection lives up to its title, burning bright and urgent as a bonfire.”
— Publishers Weekly
This compelling collection confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of the “dark magicians.” Dynamic sequences, which include a chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. With a definitive embrace of 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”— and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, this is an envisioning, re-envisioning and ultimate reinvention of the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. This phenomenal book addresses what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.
Praise
“It’s a book of terrible beauty, opulent brutality, immersed in the contradictions that kindle in and around and in reaction to black lives and deaths.”
— Jonathan Farmer, Kenyon Review
In an age of inconvenient “truths” and alternative facts, the fierce empathy and blazing truth of Incendiary Art has never been more necessary. These poems demand a reckoning.
— John S. O’Connor, The Harvard Review