Book Review - Patti Smith's Year of the Monkey

Anything is possible - it's the Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

cover blurb - February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and also inescapable sorrow. For Patti Smith - inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing - this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. 

As Patti Smith travels from CA to AZ to KY, her dreamlike writing and haunting Polaroids give Year of the Monkey quite a reflection on a life. She's a unique woman - funny,  wise,  odd, endearing,  and weird. There are times I wasn't sure I truly understood her message or thought process. However, this book is unique and intriguing,  as is the singer poet rebel that is Patti Smith.

Book Review - M Train by Patti Smith

Patti Smith’s M Train is an odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of cafes she has worked in around the world. The book is a “roadmap to my life”. (cover blurb)

Every morning in Greenwich Village, Patti Smith gets black coffee at her favorite spot. She sits with her notebook and ruminates – dreams, reality, poetry, and prose. Her travels and writing cover the gamut from Mexico to Rockaway Beach to Michigan, and beyond.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. (cover blurb) 

p.211 But a writer has no partner. He has to step back and ask himself – tell me what you see.

p. 249 I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.

p.253 There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire.

M Train by Patti Smith is a unique view into a creative mind, and I found the writing beautiful, weird, and wonderful.