M Train is a journey through eighteen “stations.” It 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. 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. For it is loss, as well as the
consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this
exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white
Polaroids taken by Smith herself
