![]() ![]() ![]() Focusing on the stinging memories of growing up black and a woman during the 1960s, one could overlook Smith’s mastery of rhyme rhythm and form, but it runs like an electric current throughout the collection. “The city squared its teeth,” she writes and “smiled oil” the chicken shack’s “slick cuisine served up in virgin white cardboard boxes with Tabasco/ nibbling the seams.” Motown saturates the language and weaves itself into Smith’s narratives. The collection builds momentum with vivid, high-textured city scenes. About This Episode: In this episode of VIDA Voices and Views, produced by Lauren Berman and R.J. Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, and performance artist. ![]() Smith’s mother bestowed on the poet a name fitting for a woman that would “never idly throat the Lord’s name or wear one/ of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees./ She’d be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone,/ jobs requiring alarm-clock discipline and sensible shoes.” But her father, though acquiescing, secretly called her Jimi Savannah, embodying “the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name/ of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All-stars.” This duality bursts forth in her poems about growing up on Chicago’s West Side, the place that lured her parents from Alabama promising a better life. In her title poem, Smith describes her mother and father debating what to call her. ![]()
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