Patricia Smith has a gift, and I am so grateful to have gotten a chance to tour this book before I was able to purchase a physical copy. I see a lot of poems ripe with potential for my high school classroom as well.

This collection was excellent. I hvae always loved Smith's work, and this was no excpetion, but in this case the inspiration she foundin these pictures and then the poems was just other level!

Patricia Smith’s latest poetry book Unshuttered was published on Feb 15. Starting twenty years ago at a Connecticut flea market, Smith collected more than 200 photographs of African Americans, each image between 120 and 180 years old. She uses the photographs (cabinet cards, cartes de visite, abrotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes) as points of departure, giving voice to a rich and painful American history that has so often been silenced. Patricia Smith is an extraordinary formalist, using fixed forms like the sonnet and terza rima in her book Incendiary Art. In Unshuttered she turns to the dramatic monologue—each character so convincing and shattering I could “hear” these poems and imagine them as a stage play—Broadway, are you listening? Though the subject matter is often difficult, given our legacy of violence and slavery, these poems never fall into spectacle. The lens becomes a rich metaphor—the photographer’s staging of the photos and Smith’s lens inventing rich and textured lives of the portrats. This is a beautiful book—not only because of Smith’s ekphrasis imagination, but also because her publisher Triquarterly has included reproductions of the photographs. Smith is unstoppable in Unshuttered, her rage and sorrow explosions of unforgettable language. Congratulations, Patricia!

Poetry is difficult for me to review; it tends to be open to interpretation, and can hit in very personal ways that are hard to explain to others, so I won't try to say how this collection made me feel. I'll say it was thoughtful and affecting, that the quiet little peeks into the possible lives of these unknown people will stay with me, and that people should read this powerful collection.

#Unshuttered #NetGalley

The archive is both incomplete and endless. Led through it by the best of historians, one only gets so far before the edges of the map dissolve into the unknown. Letters unanswered, events unrecorded, and photographs unlabeled obstruct us from total certainty. The most damning of these gaps in knowledge are those created intentionally — through bigotry, greed, and notions of supremacy.

In her latest poetry collection, Unshuttered, Patricia Smith fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Black life in 1900s America. Each poem is based on a haunting nineteenth-century photograph from the poet’s personal collection, in which all but one of the pictured people remain unidentified. With her signature wit and warmth in hand, Smith lends a voice to these silent stars in the form of taut, aching monologues.

Readers are left in awe of the lives Smith imagines for these Black men, women, and children, as well as with grief at what can never be known for sure about them. Smith takes the ekphrastic poem to new levels, waiting at the edge of that dissolving map of history and beckoning us further along. Her speculations come from a place of honest yearning as she invokes pride, joy, lust, and fear to reveal the rich inner possibilities of these unknown people.

With each line, the award-winning author provides ecstatic sound where once there was oppressive silence. As conservative politicians incite book bans and chip away at the already tenuous grasp Americans have on the bloody history of their nation, Unshuttered is a necessary reminder of the pain and loss such censorship causes.

In Silencing the Past, the late Haitian American historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot contends that silence enters the historical record at four specific junctions:

…the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). (Trouillot, p. 26)

Many of these silences are the result of systemic racism and violence. In the wake of the Civil War and the unfulfilled promises of the Reconstruction era, formerly enslaved people forged new lives for themselves. And along the way, white people in positions of power — politicians, police, and historians alike — sought to erase and obscure their hard-won triumphs. The modern reader often has to read between the lines of racist articles from white-owned newspapers to understand this time period.

The access the world still has to the experiences of African American life in the 1900s exists thanks to the tireless work of historians, archivists, and collectors who understood the importance of preserving records like newspaper clippings, marriage certificates, census records, and photographs at their inception.

Unshuttered places Patricia Smith firmly in this long line of folks keeping history as honest as possible in the face of overwhelming hate, ignorance, and carelessness. In what Trouillot would call “the moment of retrospective significance,” the poet demands acknowledgement of the remarkable people gazing out at us from the page.

I loved the collection of photographs. It'd be really hard and frankly quite ridiculous if that was a point of contention. So 10/10 on the curation. The narrative choices when it comes to the poems themselves had me raising eyebrows more times than not.

4.5 stars.

Unshuttered is a fascinating, beautiful, sometimes painful exploration of history through poetry. Poet Patricia Smith as accrued a massive collection of 19th century photographs of Black people, and has used some of those images in this ekphrastic work. Each picture featured has a complete poem to go with it, providing an imagined story to someone whose life story has been lost to time. The photographs are often stunning, and the poetry gives them a new life. The introduction from Smith helps provide some context. Overall, this is a great collection of poetry and a fascinating piece of history. Definitely recommended!

I didn't love this for personal reasons, but I do believe people should read this collection of poetry. I would recommend to others, but it wasn't personally my favorite.

Patricia Smith tells us in her introduction to her poetry collection Unshuttered, that she has “amassed a collection of more than two hundred” images of 19th century Americans: cabinet cards, cartes de visite, abrotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes.” Most are unnamed, but all are, as she says, “silent”, trapped in the past and “confined within the stifling boundaries of the photographs … They cannot laugh, weep, speak, or scream.” It is through her poems in Unshuttered that Smith gives them a voice.

Each poem is introduced with the corresponding image, followed by the poem in the “voice” of the photograph’s subject (or subjects — most are single portraits, but several are of two or more people). Some of the poems capture moments or lives of happiness but given the time setting — during slavery and Reconstruction — most as one might imagine are of a darker, more sorrowful bent. While generally strong in their narratives, I did find myself wishing for a bit more variety in tone, not to obfuscate to true horrors of the time, but to depict both the horror and the resilience in its face.

Many of the events are one might expect: a father “coiled inside a hollow poplar” to escape slavehunters, a “rabid keeper [‘s] stinging blow,” a child’s body “hung … from a beam in the mill and while he swung they took their shotguns and fired and fired into that body,” and the unequal effect of illness, as when “the Yellow Jacket swept like a whisper torrent over Memphis and hit the Negroes hardest”, those who “were taught to rely on dying.” On the other hand, Smith doesn’t simply take the cheap way out to move the reader via describing the awfulness of the age, but plies a sharp craft in her use of language, as when she has one speaker ask if there “was enough kneel in my fact” or has another describe how “fingers minstrel my shoulders.”

Smith also shows a deft hand at the sound qualities of poetry. In one, the speaker asks that Anna, “heave my hurt and humbled body close, let pity drive your slight unwilling hips into the waiting, sweated blight of mine. The “h” alliteration is the most obvious but note as well the consonance of the soft “I” that runs through “pity-unwilling-hips-into” and the internal rhyme of “slight-blight” echoed by the hard “I”” in “mine.”

While as noted I would have liked more variety, and more of a sense of startlement when it comes to language and metaphor/imagery, this is a solid collection and, I’d argue, an important one in the way it gives voice, even speculative voice, to those who cannot speak for themselves and often could not even while alive.

"I want to own this flat fixed sentence of tin so that everyone can take as gospel this chilled restraint, and we can just keep on whisper-living our lush life--which we will, whenever the night, our blacker sister, indulges us and cloaks the moon." 
For years Patricia Smith has been collecting 19th Century images of African Americans, and in this book the poet imagines the personae "confined within the stifling boundaries of the photographs." With great attention, empathy, and imagination, Smith conjures these unnamed people -- their trauma, rage, grief, shame, pride, joy. Some small part of each poem carries forward into the next, and in this way, all the different photos and stories are connected. It's beautifully done, the resulting story/poems as haunting as their corresponding black and white images. 

[Thanks Northwestern University Press and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an advanced reader copy and share my opinion of this book.]

A wonderful collection of poems, revelling in memory and history, calling back the phantoms of the past.

Many of these pieces were gorgeous and haunting. I am not typically a love of ekphrastic work, but the nature of the photos made this work for me. My singular complaint is that it became repetitive for me. I think I may have needed a few more pieces that had more sweet spots to contrast and really draw out just how bad the bitter could be so that it didn’t end up feeling like the same old story over and over. There was a piece about a set of teenage boys (one black and one white) and that one really stands out for me and stuck with me in such a haunting way for the inclusion of the way the good things could sour. All of the darkness and trauma is well represented and written, and I am sure that individually reading any of these pieces they would become extremely memorable for me. Thank you to TriQuarterly and NetGalley for the ARC.

Just before I read this remarkable book, I visited the New Orleans Museum of Art's "Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers" exhibit. There I saw hundreds of photographs made by Black studio photographers from all over the United States from the beginning of the genre to the present. Like Patricia Smith, I wondered about the lives and personalities and desires and sorrows of those who posed to have their images captured. Smith brings very real and very valid anger to her writing here, in which she speaks for or to those in the images she has found, imagining them as former enslaved persons, servants, aspiring artists, blue-collar workers, parents, children, the educated, the neglected. Her writing is direct and driving, imaginative and detail-focused. Highly recommended.

I don’t read a lot of poetry, although I like it, but this isn’t what I would call “traditional.” The author has collected hundreds of rare historic studio photographs of Black people and has paired them with poetic stories that are, at times, are as hard to read as the photos are to look at. The writings add depth to the images.

I love the concept behind this book! It has inspired me to look for old photos and write poems so I appreciate that.

Unfortunately, I wasn't a fan of the actual poetry.

I really loved and appreciated this collection. It was beautifully written. However there were some poems that weren't for me but I liked most of them and there weren't any that I disliked.

The premise of this had me hooked - poetry from the perspective of Black men and women a century and a half ago.

The poetry was strong, haunting and emotional, and technically fantastic. And each poem was paired with a photograph that is a snapshot into that time.

However, as it is important to give people a voice (especially when they have so often throughout history been silenced) I felt that by pairing poems with a photo it undermined this. You are meant to look at the photo and then read a poem from "their perspective". But who are we to force our stories, no matter how well written, on them. We cannot say what those in the photos really felt or thought, so implying they are for example transgender felt wrong to me. It would have been stronger to put the photos on the cover and allow us to "guess" who each was meant to be about, with a message at the end about not taking away their voices.

But I am just one person! And from other reviews I've seen people have not felt this way. Plus the poems and the photos (separately) are so powerful.

I really loved reading this poetry collection!
I absolutely loved how each poem was linked to a picture! I really could visualise these people telling me their thoughts through the words and it was so moving!
I loved taking in all the poems and people!
I would definitely recommend this poet and this poetry collection! It was amazing!!
I wish each poem had a title just so I could give examples of my favourite ones!

5 stars

In this unforgettable collection, Patricia Smith uses the inspiration of - as described in the preface - years of collected images and creates a voice and an experience for each one. Anyone familiar with Smith's work will be expecting a memorable and indelible set of entries; those expectations - for me - were exceeded.

The images themselves are captivating, and each poem comes in that format: image then text. Smith reveals a variety of experiences and richness and picks up on both visible and anticipated details. Readers' hearts and guts may be in knots the whole time, and while that is to some degree the point, there is also a powerful sense that comes through Smith's interpretation of the source material. Viewing the images feels voyeuristic in some ways, but there's something quite meaningful about considering the paths that the images have taken over time. Smith is likely the first to provide a voice to the individuals here versus using the images to further objectify them.

I have enjoyed Smith's work always, and I love teaching it. I cannot wait to bring selections from this collection to my students. It's a guarantee that they - and anyone lucky enough to encounter this work - will find the read lifechanging.