Patricia Smith Launch Readings

National Book Award for Poetry 2025 

Finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

'A bold re-imagining of the “new and selected” form where the poet enters into dialogue with her earlier poems, transforming a career retrospective into an engagement with earlier selves.' – Pulitzer Prize 2026 Judges' citation

Patricia Smith's retrospective The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems is published in the UK and Ireland in May 2026. It is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Summer 2026. The book was first published in the USA in September 2025 by Scribner / Simon & Schuster. The US edition of The Intentions of Thunder won the National Book Award for Poetry 2025 and was a 2026 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry.

America's Patricia Smith is one of the most indispensable, groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a 'masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard' (Poetry Foundation). The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across her career. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, 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 Patricia Smith's necessary voice.

'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.'

The Poetry Programme, RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday 2 June 2019, 7.30pm

Patricia Smith launched the UK edition of Incendiary Art at Cúirt International Festival of Literature on 12 April 2019.  The event with Patricia and Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah was recorded live at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway by The Poetry Programme, and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on 2 June 2019.  Extracts from Olivia O’Leary’s interview with both poets from half way through the performance was also included. 

Patricia Smith read her poem ‘March 3rd 2014’ from Part III of Incendiary Art.  At the end of the programme she also read a stunning new poem, composed during the Festival and developed with a special score by musician-in-residence, Ronan Browne, played by him on the low whistle. 

Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah was accompanied during her performance by Lebanese-Australian guitarist Phil Monsour.

Patricia Smith features from 9.10.  The world premiere of Patricia’s new poem, written at Cúirt and accompanied by Ronan Brown, features from 25.15.

Click here to listen via The Poetry Programme's webpages.

Patricia Smith: Live in Newcastle, 18 October 2019

Patricia Smith gave a brilliant reading from Incendiary Art  – followed by an interview with Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley – at NCLA (Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) on 18th October 2019.

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Review & poem feature for Incendiary Art

Carol Rumens discussed the poem 'Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014' in her Poem of the Week column in The Guardian of 29 June 2020. 'This week’s poem is from Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith’s collection of searing elegies for black lives destroyed.' Read the column here.

'Smith’s concentration on the resonances of fatherhood and motherhood in this book give all this suffering a devastating, and inescapable relevance to all lives.' - Ian Pople, The Manchester Review.  Click here to read the full review.

[03 May 2026]

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