Part memoir and part dream-journal, Year of the Monkey tracks Patti Smith’s solitary travels across the United States during 2016. Beginning at the Dream Inn in Santa Cruz, Smith navigates a landscape defined by the hospitalizations of her friends Sandy Pearlman and Sam Shepard. The narrative shifts between vivid descriptions of coastal diners and surreal visions involving talking candy wrappers and metaphysical signs. Smith documents her seventy-first year through the lens of political shifts in America and the personal reality of aging, utilizing her Polaroid camera to anchor her observations in physical artifacts.
Readers interested in the intersection of poetry and autobiography turn to this book for a meditation on loss and the passage of time. Musicians and artists watch a creative mind process the deaths of contemporaries while maintaining a rigorous creative practice. The reader gains a specific perspective on how to integrate memory with the present moment. It offers a blueprint for sustaining intellectual curiosity despite grief, providing a quiet look at how an artist observes the world when the external cultural environment feels increasingly unstable.
- Published
- 2019
- Language
- EN
