Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith chronicles the Great Migration through Motown music and Chicago streets.

In her newest collection, National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. From her parents’ move from the South to Chicago to being raised as an “up North” child under the spell of Motown music, she captures the rampant romanticism of waiting and hoping and the dogged disappointment and damage of living under a delusion. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals “that soul beneath the vinyl.”

Publication date: March 27, 2012

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 116 pages

ISBN: 9781566892995

Patricia Smith is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Phillis Wheatley Award from the Quarterly Black Review; Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. Professor for the City University of New York and a Cave Canem faculty member, she lives in New Jersey with her husband, Edgar Award–winning novelist Bruce DeSilva, and her dogs Brady and Rondo.

Winner of the 2014 Rebekah Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

Winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2013 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award

"There’s no one like Patricia Smith, and her bold, necessary poems light up the American twentieth century in all its song and sorrow.”

—Mark Doty

“Patricia Smith is a formidably gifted poet (‘Motown Crown’ is stunning), yet perhaps her greatest gift is her openness—my heart is made larger when I live with any of her words, if only for awhile.”

—Nick Flynn

“Patricia Smith confronts memory with delight and alarm, and manages to find music in the abject and callow."

—Kwame Dawes

“Smith doesn’t clog up the end of the poem with an easy, insincere moral; she just tells her story and gets offstage, which is exactly the right thing to do.” 

—The Stranger

“Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines.” 

—Sapphire

“Smith is a powerhouse poet. Her poems are as tightly constructed as masonry, yet they are quick-footed, spinning, singing, funny, and heartbreaking.”

—Booklist

“First of all, wow. This book is a treasure.” 

—California Journal of Women Writers

“[Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah] effortlessly moves between forms and regions.” 

—Flavorwire

“A whole-cloth remembrance, lament, and celebration that is not to be missed.”

—Coldfront

“In her current incarnation, we find one of the most authentic voice of Modern American Poetry.” 

—PANK

“Smith compresses culture ’til it peals like crystal—like singing light.” 

—Brooklyn Rail

“Smith’s rhythms create a life-breath almost as potent as Motown’s beat itself. . . . [her] fresh diction is surprising enough to be almost a new language.”

—Rattle