“Weaves poetry, dreams, art, literature, and conversational fragments into a phantasmagoric, atmospheric, and transportive whole. It’s a gift, this record of beloved absences, to which one can only respond: thank you.” - O, The Oprah Magazine “ opens her extraordinary heart and soul to us, holding nothing back and never permitting vanity to intrude. Readers who share in Smith’s transcendent pilgrimage may find themselves reborn within the pages of this exquisite memoir.” - The Washington Post Yet despite all of these losses, there is extraordinary joy here. “Begins in a tiny Greenwich Village cafe and ends as a dream requiem to the same place, encompassing an entire lost world. “Elegiac, melancholic, and meditative, filled with wistful flashbacks and haunting Polaroid snapshots.” -NPR “An eloquent-and a deeply moving-elegy for what she has ‘lost and cannot find’ but can remember in words.” - The New York Times A poetic, energetic search for the secret links between life and art-and coffee.” -Henning Mankell It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.įeaturing a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.īraiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work “a roadmap to my life.” From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: a “sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is” ( Vanity Fair), told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world.

My train patti smith