M train (AJ)

In a Greenwich Village café Patti Smith takes up residence, writing, drinking coffee, ruminating on the world as it is and the world as it was. In homage to the writers she treasures, she travels to the graves of Genet, Rimbaud and Mishima. Itinerant photographer, she documents her travels with exquisite Polaroids of artists' totems: Bolano's chair, Kahlo's crutches, Virginia Woolf's walking stick. Woven throughout are conversations on the writer's craft with an astral cowpoke and memories of a distant life in Michigan with her husband. A meditation on loss, a call to life, M Train is a poetic tour de force.'Mesmerising ... To read this book is to immerse oneself in the mind of an artist' Guardian'Achingly beautiful ... a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times