Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith uses a wide range of
poetic forms including sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and prose poems to tackle
the wide range of violence and grief that black bodies in America suffer. The
poems cover historical subjects (there is a series of sonnets about the murder
of Emmett Till) as well as contemporary and even personal contemporary subjects
(an elegy for her father, Otis Douglas Smith, a crown of sestinas).
There are no notes in the back (or front) of the book, but
the poems themselves often have epigraphs which give some insight into the
content of the poem. Many of the poems are persona poems in the voices of the grieving
mothers and women left behind.
a video of Patricia Smith reading “That Chile Emmett in That
Casket”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM1p2CscQfM
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