This April marks the 30th iteration of National Poetry Month, which was launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending one great poem to read every (work) day of the month. We make no claim (except when we do) that these poems are the “best” poems in any category; they are simply poems we love. The only other thing they all have in common is that they are available to read for free online, so you can enjoy them along with us. The internet is still good for some things, after all. Today we recommend:
Patricia Smith’s “10-Year-Old Shot Three Times But She’s Fine”
I’ve said it here before, but Patricia Smith is truly one of America’s great poets (and I mean that in a capital G, all-time, hall-of-fame kind of way). I could have chosen at random from her 2025 National Book Award-winning collection (new and selected) The Intentions of Thunder for this series, and I would have been happy. But in picking “10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine,” I wanted to highlight the other very important thing about Smith as a poet (aside from her canonical status): she is one of the greatest readers on the planet today.
Aside from the second stanza, which is a brief dialogue between the eponymous victim and an unnamed adult, the first and then third through sixth stanzas feature fairly uniform line lengths that are broken in the middle of a sentence. Though the line breaks are very intentional and rhythmically appropriate they also serve to create stanzas-as-paragraphs, which almost disguises the poem as prose. What does this have to do with Smith’s prowess as a reader? Read one of these almost paragraphs (the first) below, and feel the musicality of Smith’s language burst past the limits of line and punctuation. It doesn’t matter what you call it or even how it’s arranged, it demands to erupt into song, it needs to be read aloud:
Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book
itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl
and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder
spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall
above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train
engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.
But aside from all that technical stuff—and as is the case with so many Patricia Smith poems—“10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine” leaves readers asking the same simple question: How can something so hard and awful get hewn into something so moving, so beautiful?
Read the full poem here.(Or buy the book.)
Source:
lithub.com