Ocean State Libraries

"In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, [a] ... fairy tale about...

"In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message "Hello Everybody!" Known for shooting with her beloved Land 250 Camera, Smith started posting selfies with her phone, portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots, and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith's world, her daily coffee, the books...

Offering a unique analysis and discussion of her life, career, and work, this is the true story of Patti Smith. Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant American artists of the rock age, an acclaimed poet, and a figurehead for many liberal political causes, Patti Smith went from an ugly-duckling childhood in postwar New Jersey to become queen of the 1970s New York art scene. Not a tell-all biography, this measured, accurate, and enthusiastic...

"Patti's Smith's exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love: a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko's iconic billboard, Max's Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. The extraordinary people who passed through...

"From the moment Patti Smith burst onto the scene chanting "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," the irreverent opening line to her 1975 debut album Horses, the punk movement had found its dissident intellectual voice. This raw compilation of interviews with Smith chronicles the creative career of the legendary "godmother of punk," from her volatile rise in the New York underground in the '70s to her continuing role as mystic and matriarch...

Patti Smith is a renowned singer, songwriter, poet and activist. Her music, poetry, and politics are fearless, funny, raw and original. Traces Patti's punk-poet roots through the trials of daily life and untimely deaths that have formed her life and art. Touches on her early days in New York City and includes the people dearest to her, her family, and the political causes she champions.