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Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2018 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a 2018 NAACP Image Award More about this author >
The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s 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—and of Smith’s necessary voice. Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living.
Patricia Smith’s The Intentions of Thunder chronicles America’s traditions, tragedies, and triumphs with steadfast invention. Every book since her groundbreaking debut has been a fusion of form and feeling. Her work redefines the relationship between spoken and written poetry. These new and selected poems are personal while communal; immediate while historical; demonstrative while sublime. In The Intentions of Thunder, language itself becomes weather—charged, clarifying, and resounding, a form of resurrection and survival.
Patricia Smith at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
Patricia Smith, Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry
