Blood Dazzler: Poems

By Patricia Smith

“These short, fiery verses describe with sorrow and passion the Crescent City just before, during and immediately after Katrina.” —Publishers Weekly In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar: The cowboy grins through the terrible din,And in the Ninth, a choking woman wailsLook like this country done left us for dead. “Smith’s poems are captivating and their heartrending subject matter adds to their allure. She is observant and precise; she captures a moment in our history that many will never forget, but also a moment that just as many will never begin to know. Blood Dazzler makes available to its readers a chilling time in America and crystallizes the nation’s fears and weaknesses.” —Coldfront

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781566893657

Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art;Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration ion with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Smith is the winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. She is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, as well as an instructor for Cave Canem, the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Writing Program.

Book preview

5 P.M., TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2005

Data from an Air Force reserve unit reconnaissance aircraft . . . along with observations from the Bahamas and nearby ships . . . indicate the broad low pressure area over the southeastern Bahamas has become organised enough to be classified as tropical depression twelve.

—NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER

A muted thread of gray light, hovering ocean,

becomes throat, pulls in wriggle, anemone, kelp,

widens with the want of it. I become

a mouth, thrashing hair, an overdone eye. How dare

the water belittle my thirst, treat me as just

another

small

disturbance,

try to feed me

from the bottom of its hand?

I will require praise,

unbridled winds to define my body,

a crime behind my teeth

because

every woman begins as weather,

sips slow thunder, knows her hips. Every woman

harbors a chaos, can

wait for it, straddling a fever.

For now,

I console myself with small furies,

those dips in my dawning system. I pull in

a bored breath. The brine shivers.

11 A.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2005

"Satellite imagery . . . Doppler radar data from the Bahamas and Miami . . . indicate [tropical depression twelve] has become much better organized . . . has strengthened into tropical storm

Reviews for Blood Dazzler

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Patricia's poetic meditation on Hurricane Katrina is an exploration of a city and its people reflected in the awe and terror of a relentless storm. It is a voyage into the consciousness of New Orleans, with the minds of its people conceived and explored by Smith's pen. It is also a meeting with the voice of the destroyer. Katrina is turned into a raging demigod of nature with something to prove. At last, unavoidably, it is an indictment of our government's failures in handling her. Smith's amazing ability to adopt different vices proves vital here, enabling her to compose a collection of portraits that offers the reader a unique and unflinching view into a horrific and shameful event in American history. Much like Whitman's treatment of the Civil War, Smith's Blood Dazzler will one day stand as an insightful and essential document, a resource inextricably bound up with its subject.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A rough and powerful engagement of Hurricane Katrina's existence and destruction, these poems explore the voices and the culture affected by Katrina and those affecting her path and legacy. Smith's varied structures and poems are a re-journeying through the days of the hurricane and through the injustices surrounding New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane. Her deliberate exploration and careful choices throughout the work, along with a sparse inclusion of quotes from politicians and news broadcasts, make this work come together in a collage of meaning that goes beyond simple documentation or interpretation. Smith has a magic with language, and it combines with belief and outrage and love here to make a collection that forms not only the emotional biography of a storm, but an urgent remembering and act of witnessing. In the end, this is a poetry collection not quite like any other--necessary, powerful, filled with beauty and fear, and worth reading.

[audraj_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was a collection of poems I couldn't put down. Amazing. Smith's narrative leaves no human emotion untapped, and no one's story is left untold. Beautiful, sickening, heartbreaking, reverent and irreverent--all at the same time--it is a must read.

[plenilune · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. Exquisitely rendered account of one of the most devastating events in the history of the U.S. Even if you've never read or cared for poetry, you must read this. If you love poetry or write it, this is how it should be done. Relevant and political yet with ample heart and soul.