Unshuttered: Poems [Hardcover]

National Book Award winner Patricia Smith presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century 
 
Over the course of two decades, Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.  

Unshutteredis a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smiths searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:  

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners 
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us. 

Patricia Smith's unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths doing what she does best—unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.
 

PATRICIA SMITHs honors include the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2021 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, includingIncendiary Art(TriQuarterly Books), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the poetry category, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; andBlood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guggenheim Fellow, Civitella Ranieri Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, finalist for the Neustadt Inl{