Intentions of Thunder

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.