![]() ![]() Like her famous black-and-white Polaroid photos (some of which are scattered throughout the book), the chapters of “M Train” are magic lantern slides, jumping, free-associatively, between the present and the past, and from subject to subject. ![]() Smith, 68, is remarkably attuned to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial. ![]() Her book is about moving from a time when her children were little and “the things I touched were living” (“my husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee”) to a time when she increasingly began to capture and memorialize moments from her life in photos and words - to create, as an artist, talismanic souvenirs of the past. Losing her early New York friend and roommate, Robert Mapplethorpe, to AIDS in 1989. Losing her brother, Todd, a month later to a stroke. Losing her husband, the guitarist Fred (Sonic) Smith, to heart failure in 1994 at the age of 45. Patti Smith’s achingly beautiful new book, “M Train,” is a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance. ![]()
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