Winner of the National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, 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.

Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder; Incendiary Art; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, and Blood Dazzler. Smith is a 2024 inductee into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim fellow, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and a four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is a professor at Princeton University.