Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically-acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023), Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015). Writing about Incendiary Art, Publisher’s Weekly praised Smith’s “razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities that give her scenes a cinematic flair and her lines a momentum that buoys their emotional weight.”
Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House, and anthologized in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. Smith also co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books, 2012).
Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, an Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Ethel's Sestina
Ethel Freeman's body sat for days in her wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center. Her son Herbert, who had assured his mother that help was on the way, was forced to leave her there once she died.
Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,
gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.
I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait.
He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep.
I trust his every word. Herbert my son.
I believe him when he says help gon’ come.
Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come
to this place. Now on the ground ’round my chair,
they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son
could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun
foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep,
making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait.
Lawd, some folks prayin’ for rain while they wait,
forgetting what rain can do. When it come,
it smashes living flat, wakes you from sleep,
eats streets, washes you clean out of the chair
you be sittin’ in. Best to praise this sun,
shinin’ its dry shine. Lawd have mercy, son,
is it coming? Such a strong man, my son.
Can’t help but believe when he tells us, Wait.
Wait some more. Wish some trees would block this sun.
We wait. Ain’t no white men or buses come,
but look—see that there? Get me out this chair,
help me stand on up. No time for sleepin’,
cause look what’s rumbling this way. If you sleep
you gon’ miss it. Look there, I tell my son.
He don’t hear. I’m ’bout to get out this chair,
but the ghost in my legs tells me to wait,
wait for the salvation that’s sho to come.
I see my savior’s face ’longside that sun.
Nobody sees me running toward the sun.
Lawd, they think I done gone and fell asleep.
They don't hear Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Ain’t but one power make me leave my son.
I can’t wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can’t wait.
Don’t cry, boy, I ain’t in that chair no more.
Wish you coulda come on this journey, son,
seen that ol’ sweet sun lift me out of sleep.
Didn’t have to wait. And see my golden chair?
--from Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008)