Okay, but the Patricia Smith book is one-dimensional ambulance chasing too, filled with stereotypes and cardboard cut-out characters talking down to the actual residents of New Orleans. I’ve never read a book of poems so obviously polished for the prize-circuit.

Wow. I thought Patricia Smith’s poems were the most ear-jangling. She writes the voices of people from St. Rita’s in St. Bernard Parish as if they were black. They were not.