M Train

M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning to drink black coffee, ruminate on the world as it is and the world as it was, and write in her notebook. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir. Illustrated with Smith's own stunning black-and-white Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on endings and on beginnings, a poetic tour de force by one of the most brilliant multiplatform artists at work today.