| Incendiary Art | |
| Author: | Patricia Smith |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Poetry |
| Publisher: | TriQuarterly Books |
| Pub Date: | February 15, 2017 |
| Media Type: | Print (paperback), e-book |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Isbn: | 978-0-8101-3433-1 |
| Isbn Note: | (paperback) |
| Oclc: | 1033415329 |
| Dewey: | 811.54 |
| Congress: | PS3569.M537839 I53 2017 |
Incendiary Art is a collection of poems written by American poet, Patricia Smith.[1] It was published on February 15, 2017, by TriQuarterly Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. This collection was written as a response to the violent deaths of African American males and females in the United States, with a focus on the grief of the mothers who try to protect them, to no avail. Its title is a reference to the role of fire in African American lives, including the burning of Ku Klux Klan crosses and the burning spurred by riots in Black communities across America.
The collection was awarded the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award[2] and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[3]
The collection is centered around a series of poems based on a 13-year-old African-American male named Emmett Till from Chicago who, while visiting his relatives during the summer of 1955 in Mississippi, was violently murdered after being accused of offending a white woman. The murderers, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all white jury. The series of poems are entitled: "Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure", inspired by the children's book series Choose Your Own Adventure, where the reader can choose their own ending to the story by turning to certain pages and following that trajectory. Smith uses this device to imagine what would have happened to Till under various different circumstances.
Incendiary Art contains a series of poems divided into four headings, including: Incendiary, When Black Men Drown Their Daughters, Accidental, and Shooting Into the Mirror. The poetic forms such as prose poems, villanelles, sonnets, and sestinas are some of the techniques employed in the poems.
I. Incendiary
II. When Black Men Drown Their Daughters
III. Accidental
IV. Shooting into the Mirror
Publishers Weekly praised Smith's "razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities", singling out "Elegy" as one of the collection's best poems.[4]
The collection was also reviewed in The Kenyon Review[5] and Harvard Review.[6]