Year Of The Monkey

"That is what Patti Smith offers with uncommon elegance of thought and feeling in Year of the Monkey — a dream-driven, reality-reclaiming masterpiece, laced with poetry and philosophy and surrealism and the hardest realism there is: that of hope."

"Patti Smith calmly, sadly traces the foggy outline of a liminal and pernicious year, 2016, which delivered changes both personal – the declining health of playwright and actor Sam Shepard, the death of music producer Sandy Pearlman – and global. In this slim volume, Smith glides through her dreamlike world as a famous spirit might, performing, writing, reading, drinking coffee and a very occasional sip of alcohol. “I tried to shrug off unease, do my work, say my prayers, bide my time,” she writes near the dead-middle of the book, in which she does exactly that in her way, exactly."