The Intentions of Thunder

New and Selected Poems

Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry!

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—and of Smith’s necessary voice.

Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.

Praise

“The Intentions of Thunder is much like its author: abundant, brilliant, and unprecedented.”
—Poetry Northwest

“Her poetry is consistently insightful and meditative, holding together worlds of pain, beauty, and transformation with her lyricism….a can’t miss release.” 
—Chicago Review of Books

“Performing the work of ‘desperate remembering,’ Smith revels in Black joy even as she records the violence committed against Black bodies in the name of white supremacy:“We are the disappeared, desolate, and misplaced,/ dark magicians stronger than any root or conjure.”
—Publishers Weekly