Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Smith maps her creative life in this sequence of atmospheric, tender, and lithe essays ondreams, solitude, travel, and love. Smith's passion for the elixir of black coffee savored in quiet cafés, her sanctuaries and studios, forms a unifying refrain within these exquisite, transporting, and reflective autobiographical tales. A poet, performer, artist, vagabond, and National Book Award-winning memoirist for Just Kids (2010), Smith came to art through a working-class portal and gratefully pays homage to the visionaries who have long guided and inspired her. She chronicles audacious pilgrimages to Frida Kahlo's home; the former site of a penal colony in French Guiana, in honor of Genet; Tangiers, where she meets Paul Bowles; various writers' graves in Japan; and Berlin for a meeting of the esoteric Continental Drift Club, founded to honor the explorer Alfred Wegener. Deepening her mission of remembrance, Smith writes lovingly of her factory-worker father and his inner elegance, and her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she shared mystical times. She muses over her passion for reading, addiction to detective shows, and bouts with melancholia, and tells the fable-like story of the old, decrepit bungalow she bought on Queens' Far Rockaway beachfront right before the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy. Smith is astutely romantic, gracefully imaginative, gently spiritual, and touchingly humble in this beautiful and entrancing chronicle of dancing to the music of change and finding words that balance loss. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the concurrent release of her Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015 (see p.29), Smith will be the focus of major and diverse media coverage as she conducts an extensive national tour.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Following Smith's bestselling and critically acclaimed book Just Kids, this essay collection creates a map of the singer-songwriter's peripatetic journeys to cafes, cemeteries, hotels, and train stations around the world. She is the perfect guide, revealing the mysteries in the shadows, the little bits of life people often take for granted-such as a good cup of coffee, a familiar coat, or the "transformation of the heart." In 19 imagistic reflections, Smith invites readers to travel with her from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul and Sylvia Plath's grave to the Far Rockaway bungalow that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy comes ashore and destroys much of the surrounding territory. Smith's haunting and joyful recollections of her life with her late husband, Fred Sonic Smith, anchor her intensely physical descent into memory and its ability to haunt her waking and dreaming life. Smith illustrates her meditations with her signature Polaroid photos of Fred, as well as objects such as her father's desk chair and the chess table where Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky. The narrative carries readers through the despair, loss, hope, consolation, and mysteries that Smith faces as she lives through Fred's death, struggles with the writer's craft, and comes to realize, through one of her dreams, that the "writer is a conductor"-and she is indeed a phenomenal conductor along these elegant tours of the haunting places in her life, where anyone might stumble upon momentary but life-altering wisdom. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This quiet memoir may surprise fans of Smith's music, as it makes no reference to her career as a rock icon or even that she's a musician. The book is more a travel diary than anything else, meditating on Smith's journeys to Mexico, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, always returning to her homes (old and new) in New York, but never for long. Smith visits favorite authors (living and dead), memories of her late husband, a slightly mysterious explorer's society, and always has her eye on the next perfect cup of coffee and her obsession with detective shows. VERDICT Recommended for listeners seeking an eccentric wander around the world or meditations on art and mortality; for fans of Smith who would enjoy seeing an unexpected side of the music legend. ["In many ways, this book defies categorization, and that is one of its many charms": LJ 9/1/5 review of the Knopf hc.]-Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Iconic poet, writer, and artist Smith (Just Kids, 2010, etc.) articulates the pensive rhythm of her life through the stations of her travels. Spending much of her time crouched in a corner table of a Greenwich Village cafe sipping coffee, jotting quixotic notes in journals, and "plotting my next move," the author reflects on the places she's visited, the personal intercourse, and the impact each played on her past and present selves. She describes a time in 1978 when she planned to open her own cafe, but her plans changed following a chance meeting with MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, who swiftly stole and sealed her heart with marriage and children. A graceful, ruminative tour guide, Smith writes of traveling together with Fred armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana, then of solitary journeys to Frida Kahlo's Mexican Casa Azul and to the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and a swath of legendary Japanese filmmakers. After being seduced by Rockaway Beach in Queens and indulgently purchasing a ramshackle bungalow there, the property was destroyed by Hurricane Sandythough she vowed to rebuild. In a hazy, often melancholy narrative, the author synchronizes past memories and contemporary musings on books, art, and Michigan life with Fred. Preferring to write productively from the comfort of her bed, Smith vividly describes herself as "an optimistic zombie propped up by pillows, producing pages of somnambulistic fruit." She spent seasons of lethargy binge-watching crime TV, arguing with her remote control, venturing out to a spontaneous and awkward meeting with chess great Bobby Fischer, and trekking off to interview Paul Bowles in Tangiers. No matter the distance life may take her, Smith always recovers some semblance of normalcy with the simplistic pleasures of a deli coffee on her Gotham stoop, her mind constantly buoyed by humanity, art, and memory. Not as focused as Just Kids, but an atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir to be savored and pondered. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
