Blood Dazzler: Poems

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 show more 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. show less

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 voices 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 show more 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. show less

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.

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.

One of the best collections of poetry collections of poetry from an United States poet that I've read in a while. Thematically it reminds me a bit of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology. it is very direct which is something I always personally appreciate in poetry.

Brilliant, heartbreaking. READ THIS BOOK.