Review by-Ashley Mack-Jackson
I first encountered Patricia Smith’s work in the fall of 2001, a nervous high school senior encouraged by my friend and choirmate, the poet and photographer Corey Ewing, to join the speech team. Corey, having somehow discovered my love for writing poetry, introduced me to the world of Poetry Interpretation. This speech team event required students to perform five minutes of published poetic work in competition. Thank God for that rule. Like most angsty teens who write, I was convinced my own poems were the only ones that truly mattered. Though my mother had raised me up on the work of Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nikki Giovanni, I was seventeen and dumb enough to believe that only my own work could speak for and to me.
In an effort to find a Black woman poet who I could call my own, I asked around. A librarian, a teacher, or maybe even Corey himself, put me onto the work of Patricia Smith. By 2001, I was aware of Saul Williams, who had a book published by MTV, the height of cool in the early aughts, but I hadn’t yet seen the 1998 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Slam or the documentary SlamNation, which featured Smith alongside Williams and other influential hip-hop era poets like Jessica Care Moore. At that time, Smith was perhaps best known for being the four-time winner of the National Poetry Slam, an arena of competitive poetry I didn’t even know existed.
The book I received, Smith’s second, Big Towns, Big Talk (1992, Zoland Books),with its bright, geometric, jazz-infused cover art by David H. Cowles, was a revelation. It was filled with poems that showed me just how much I didn’t know about the possibilities of poetry and, crucially, about the possibilities of my own Black-girl self. Since that moment, Patricia Smith has been perhaps my greatest and most enduring teacher of poetry. Her work has never let me go; never let me down. And this applies to The Intentions of Thunder (2025, Scribner), the first collection that attempts to span the breadth of her genius with both new and selected poems.
The late Gwendolyn Brooks, whose blurb was on the back of Big Towns, Big Talk and is now also included on The Intentions of Thunder, wrote that Patricia Smith’s work is “direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome.” This new collection carries that promise forward, showcasing work that is as accessible as it is surprising. Smith’s work is like the God-clap announced in its title, both familiar and utterly unfathomable in the intricacies of its raw power.
The beauty of a collection that spans so much of a creative lifetime is that it invites us to witness a poet’s journey and the enduring power of her earliest visions and travel into the future with her to see what has become of the journey. In revisiting poems like the collection’s opener, “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)” (Life According to Motown, 1991), I am instantly transported back to my seventeen-year-old self, desperate to communicate my experience to classmates and teachers and most of all myself. The poem captures the fragmented nature of a life lived under observation, “…primping in front of mirrors that deny/ your reflection…finding a space between/ your legs, a disturbance at your chest…” While the poem is directly addressed to everyone who is not a Black girl, I know, deeply, that it is for me as much now as it was then. It is a mirror for the reflected, not just a window for the observer.
The selection also revisits “Skinhead” (Big Towns, Big Talk, 1992), arguably one of Smith’s most well-known poems, which gained broader visibility on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam in 2003. This poem plunges us into the early 1990s American zeitgeist, a time when American neo-Nazis were an old-school form of clickbait. These characters filled my after-school hours on daytime talk shows, where they spewed venomous rage. They were not presented for understanding or self-reflection; they were presented as figures apart from us, condemned by a chorus of studio audience boos and hisses. But Smith’s work again and again corrects the farce of separateness, daring us to acknowledge a terrible intimacy: “I’m your baby, America, your boy,/ Drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.” Smith is always traveling backward, forward, and into the very center of the storm, making the rereading of her previously collected work an act of seeing into a both surreal and utterly precedented now.
Both the genius and the approachability of this collection are perhaps most evident in Smith’s introductions to the different sections, where she allows the poet herself to be personified, engaging in a dialogue with her own body of work. In the introduction to the section from National Book Award finalist Blood Dazzler (2008), a devastating collection centered on Hurricane Katrina, Smith writes, “Writers slip a medal over her head, say This is good work, poet. But when the limelight washes over the snazzy awards, she sees a table of snarling skinheads, another table of immeasurably sad women without sons. Being poems hasn’t saved them.” In embodying such limitations, Smith remakes herself into a novice, which is quite a feat for someone with her immeasurable skill. It would be, perhaps, easier to live in the reverberation of the thunderous applause than to write into the inherent limitations of the self and the art, but Smith’s work always resists that which is easy in service to that which is true.
The pursuit of this uncomfortable but essential truth is most evident in Smith’s previously uncollected work. In poems like, “First Time Trying to Say Where My Son Was,” she grapples with the limitations of both skill and preparation in the face of the forces of nature that are beyond our control or reason, writing, “…I am a huge excuse, a resolution/machine a shackled poet with my past chained to my hands/what she know,/her boy in jail anyway.” There is a painful awareness of the distance between the intellectual capacity and poetic skill the poet possesses and her inability to enact real-world change, even for her own child. It strips away the comfort of art, leaving us to confront the reality of powerlessness.
Yet, Patricia Smith certainly has the power; she can shape linear form as deftly as she can perform a turn of phrase on a stage that will make a crowd holler. But her true power is in her ability to resist hiding behind that immense skill. This benefits her work and, ultimately, us, her readers. She operates with profound respect for her teachers and the tradition that only great teachers can have. Even in her virtuoso performance of language and form, we are invited to explore, to examine, and even to play with her. She makes the familiar new, leans into her willingness to learn, and shows up as a voice full of the wisdom of generations, and yet also as an eternal novice. The Intentions of Thunder is a magnificent collection that allows us to marvel at the intricacies of Smith’s work while feeling its fundamental, powerful truth resonate deep in our bones.
Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner 2025); Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, BOMB, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. Her contribution to that volume, “When They Are Done With Us,” was awarded the Robert L. Fish Award for best debut short story from the Mystery Writers of America and was published in Best American Mystery Stories.
Smith is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She is also a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.
Smith is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.
Ashley Mack-Jackson is a native Hoosier, and received a B.A. in English Creative Writing from IUPUI, and an M.A. in English Creative Writing from Ball State University. Her main joys in life are teaching, reading, and writing. She is a lecturer in the College of Education at Butler University, and her poetry has appeared in literary journals like Reverie, Drumvoices Revue, and Callaloo.