Patricia Smith’s latest poetry book Unshuttered was published on Feb 15. Starting twenty years ago at a Connecticut flea market, Smith collected more than 200 photographs of African Americans, each image between 120 and 180 years old. She uses the photographs (cabinet cards, cartes de visite, abrotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes) as points of departure, giving voice to a rich and painful American history that has so often been silenced. Patricia Smith is an extraordinary formalist, using fixed forms like the sonnet and terza rima in her book Incendiary Art. In Unshuttered she turns to the dramatic monologue—each character so convincing and shattering I could “hear” these poems and imagine them as a stage play—Broadway, are you listening? Though the subject matter is often difficult, given our legacy of violence and slavery, these poems never fall into spectacle. The lens becomes a rich metaphor—the photographer’s staging of the photos and Smith’s lens inventing rich and textured lives of the portrats. This is a beautiful book—not only because of Smith’s ekphrasis imagination, but also because her publisher Triquarterly has included reproductions of the photographs. Smith is unstoppable in Unshuttered, her rage and sorrow and joy explosions of unforgettable language. Congratulations, Patricia!
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Author: Denise Duhamel
