Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith chronicles the Great Migration through Motown music and Chicago streets.
In her newest collection, National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. From her parents’ move from the South to Chicago to being raised as an “up North” child under the spell of Motown music, she captures the rampant romanticism of waiting and hoping and the dogged disappointment and damage of living under a delusion. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals “that soul beneath the vinyl.”
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In her title poem, Smith describes her mother and father debating what to call her. 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. The collection builds momentum with vivid, high-textured city scenes. "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. 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.
