Incendiary Art

Incendiary Art is a collection of poems written by American poet, Patricia Smith.

[1] It was published on February 15, 2017, by TriQuarterly Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press.

This collection was written as a response to the violent deaths of African American males and females in the United States, with a focus on the grief of the mothers who try to protect them, to no avail.

[3] The collection is centered around a series of poems based on a 13-year-old African-American male named Emmett Till from Chicago who, while visiting his relatives during the summer of 1955 in Mississippi, was violently murdered after being accused of offending a white woman.

Shooting into the Mirror Publishers Weekly praised Smith's "razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities", singling out "Elegy" as one of the collection's best poems.