In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent, to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.

Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:

The cowboy grins through the terrible din,
***
And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails
Look like this country done left us for dead.

An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be news that stays news, Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.

Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog. Visit her website at www.wordwoman.ws.

An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century

Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.

Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith's searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners'
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.

The poet's unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature's finest wordsmiths doing what she does best--unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.

Winner, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category
Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Winner, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award
Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice
Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Winner, 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

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.

Winner of 2013 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry

Finalist for 2013 William Carlos Williams Award

Winner of 2014 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms Smith's new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautiful--and like the America she embodies and represents--dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines. --Sapphire

One of the best poets around and has been for a long time. --Terrance Hayes

Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome. --Gwendolyn Brooks

In her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals that soul beneath the vinyl.

Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.

Leafy sea dragons may look like a plant and swim like a sea horse, but they aren't a plant or a sea horse (or a dragon). Pictures of these unique beautiful creatures will captivate the reader as they learn about where leafy sea dragons live, how they reproduce, what they eat, how they use camouflage, and how to protect their habitat.

This beautifully written book includes pictures of leafy sea dragons, maps, and information on the Great Barrier Reef.

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders.

What power. Smith's poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.--Marvin Bell

I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.--Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judge

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 cele-bration of poetry's liberating power.

Leafy sea dragons may look like a plant and swim like a sea horse, but they aren't a plant or a sea horse (or a dragon). Pictures of these unique beautiful creatures will captivate the reader as they learn about where leafy sea dragons live, how they reproduce, what they eat, how they use camouflage, and how to protect their habitat.

This beautifully written book includes pictures of leafy sea dragons, maps, and information on the Great Barrier Reef.

Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last. --Danez Smith, The Guardian

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--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.

The word lucid means mentally clear or conscious awareness in a dream. Achieving the awareness of self and the ability to know you are dreaming while dreaming is the official definition of Lucidity. However, there is low lucidity and high lucidity. We want to achieve high lucidity where we can actually control the dream. Not just achieve awareness.

Want to become the type of woman men find attractive and want to be in love with? Want to be able to ignite primal attraction? If you would like to become the type of woman men find irresistible... then this book will show you how. How will you learn to attract the right partner? The #1 worst mistake most women make with men. It instantly kills attraction and makes men see you as repulsive. (Hint: It's way more common than you might think.) Why men love bitches. (And how you can attract the right attention... without being a complete asshole.) The type of woman men have evolved to find irresistible, and how you can use this to trigger instinctive attraction And much, much more To find the right partner for you: that soulmate you desire, this book is the answer.

Distant Suns - The Journey Home is the sequel to Distant Suns.The crew of the star ship Terra - the last hope to avoid extinction for the human race - are nearly two years from the dying planet Earth, when their four thousand year long journey, to reach the first possible habitable world, is unexpectedly halted.

A massive cloud of hydrogen is travelling through space on a collision course with Earth. At a high-ranking meeting two astronomers, Edward and Joseph, are sworn to secrecy when they reveal that in six months' time, as the gas envelops the planet, it will turn the atmosphere into a fireball. Their beautiful young prodigy, the resourceful Lauren, is initially kept in the dark, but soon discovers the destination of the cloud when she calculates its route. Two months before its encounter with Earth, the gas is captured and absorbed by the planet Jupiter. They think they have avoided disaster, but you can be looking the wrong way when the end of the world sneaks up on you. A beautifully descriptive, action packed story about love, self-sacrifice and the desperate battle to avoid extinction on a dying world. Praise for Distant Suns: The subject matter of your book couldn't be more topical or timely and I found the central premise of your story to be fascinating. All the material in your book to do with the gas clouds, asteroids, superheating, etc., is absolutely brilliant. You manage to put across very simply some ideas that I am sure are actually quite complicated. The inclusion later on in the narrative of those short scenes from various corners of the world helps to establish the global impact of the story. It also opens the narrative out, lending it a pleasing cinematic feel and creating a sense of urgency and community. - TLC Both Cindy, our publisher, and I agree that the novel is wonderful, and that it should make an exciting movie. - Ed Lord Review: I enjoyed reading both the dialogue rich scenes of the characters struggling with a now imminent uncertainty, interspersed with the science scenes of astral happenings and the unfolding effects of a planet being slowly stripped of the atmosphere that gave it life. The science is wholly credible and the characters express beautifully the sadness, joy and hope which lies in the gaps in between those extremes of emotion just as the hope that lies in the distances between the stars. - Neal Terry Also by Patricia Smith: Time Split and Distant Suns - The Journey Home.

Staten Island is the forgotten borough, lacking a subway system, left out of Jay-Z's songs, known for organized crime, bad accents, fake tans, and garbage--which makes it a rich setting for Akashic's noir series . . . In a thrilling tilt-a-whirl of crime and drama, editor Patricia Smith has carefully chosen writers concerned with the true nature of the small suburban borough. --Electric Literature's The Outlet

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Bill Loehfelm, S.J. Rozan, Ted Anthony, Todd Craig, Ashley Dawson, Bruce DeSilva, Louisa Ermelino, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Michael Largo, Michael Penncavage, Linda Nieves-Powell, Eddie Joyce, Shay Youngblood, and Patricia Smith.

From the introduction by Patricia Smith:

There's crime here. Good crime. Mystery. Dark, scary stuff. Big crime. The noir kind, without a good guy in sight. Just scan the headlines: Skeleton in Staten Island Basement Points to Unsolved Murder; Staten Island Man Commits Murder after Victim Had Spit in Wife's Face. Then there's the haunted Kreischer mansion on Arthur Kill Road. Mob Wives, for Chrissakes, with all that squalling, hair-pulling, and Botox. A recent spate of hate crimes against blacks, Mexicans, Muslims. Mist-shrouded abandoned psychiatric hospitals. Guys named Eddie. Underground caverns. Willowbrook. The ghostly ship graveyard. The legend of Cropsey. That rolling landfill and all those secrets buried beneath it. Even the one movie that was named after the borough got it exactly right. Here's the synopsis: A Staten Island mob boss Parmie is robbed by septic tank cleaner Sully who has a pal Jasper, a deaf deli employee moonlighting as a corpse chopper . . . That's a damned sunshiny day on the island.

I'm not sure why Staten Island is the borough bringing up the rear in Akashic Books' Noir Series, but here we are, as rotten, vengeful, unforgiving, and badass as any one of its quartet of brothers.

Compassion Satisfaction: 50 Steps to Healthy Caregiving presents 50 strategies for creating caregiving partnerships leading to healthier caregiving practices. Each strategy is followed by five helpful suggestions to aid helpers and organizations in creating authentic, sustainable care. In order for caregivers everywhere to be change agents, we must take the first step and act on behalf of ourselves and those we serve. Successful caregiving outcomes bring satisfying results and motivates those in our care, promotes collaboration, and heralds a new level of satisfaction in the work we choose to do. And most important, raises our Compassion Satisfaction levels

Compassion fatigue plagues caregivers worldwide. When providing care to others without incorporating authentic, sustainable self-care practices into our daily lives, destructive symptoms surface. Isolation, emotional outbursts, substance abuse and reoccurring nightmares are just a few of the symptoms that can distress the life of a caregiver. With awareness and knowledge, compassion fatigue can be recognized and managed. To Weep for a Stranger: Compassion Fatigue in Caregiving is the first step in learning more about this emotional and physical pain-filled syndrome and how to break free from the bonds that restrict compassionate, dedicated caregivers from living a happy, healthy life. Included in this book is the definition of compassion fatigue, its symptoms and causes, and standards of self-care. Also, you'll find information for those new to the helping professions and a special section for family caregivers.

In the 1960s, the live of black children were shaped by the glittery specter of Motown--a world of furious flash, undeniable glamour, and impossible romantic ideals. Some discovered the truth before it was too late. Others still drape their blues in the silken sounds, swirling in dimly-lit rooms in an endless, blinding slow dance. Patricia Smith, born and raised on Chicago's West Side, grew and thrived on the bright promise of Motown. Life According to Motown, the new collection by the five-time champion of Chicago's famous Uptown Poetry Slam, recounts in vivid imagery the lessons taught by and learned from Motown, as well as a thrilling collection of new works.

Reviews: A great read that was packed full of suspense and action. One of the best time travel books I've read in awhile. I started reading this book and before I knew it, it was three in the morning. When I woke the next day I couldn't wait to get back to it because I had to know what happened. A scientist's 'harmless' tinkering, just before World War II, causes a catastrophic change of events which lead to nuclear war in the present. 40 minutes into the war most of North America, Asia and Europe were destroyed. A cycle of annihilation, which once started became impossible to stop. The launch of missiles, detected by satellites, set the wheels in motion for the retaliatory strikes to begin. No nation escaped the cascade that followed; even those neutral in the war. Detonation was the only warning for most that things had escalated beyond reason as the use of thermo-weapons had never been discussed. A huge electromagnetic pulse, which fried all electrical equipment inside the strike zone, shut down power grids and plunged the region into darkness. A microsecond later there followed a flash of intense white light, which filled the sky, as a small sun erupted within the city. As the glare burned the corneas from their eyes, it simultaneously cauterised their optic nerves, but the blindness and pain only distressed for a nanosecond. Superheated air, expanding at a rate of 400 metres per second, dwarfed all previous torment. Skin was seared and lungs disintegrated as a last agonised breath choked in the furnace. On the fringes of the inferno, fires erupted in every direction whilst in the centre, where temperatures reached millions of degrees centigrade, everything was vaporised in a millisecond. The scorching, dust-filled air tore upward in a fiery plume, looking, to all at a distance safe enough to witness the madness, as though hell had broken loose. Seconds later it hit the stratosphere where, cooling, it began to fan outwards, forming the terrifying calling card of man's most destructive weapon. There was no hope on January 28th. The mercy for most was death came swiftly. On a worldwide scale, billions died immediately following the initial strikes, and in the weeks after, millions more from radiation and starvation. None of this had to happen; none of this should have happened; and it wouldn't have happened had it not been for the good intentions of one man.