MEMOIR

Bread of Angels

Patti Smith

Bloomsbury, $34.99

The crumb trail begins at once. “The pen scratches across the page rebel hump rebel hump rebel hump . What do those words mean, asks the pen. I don’t know, says the wrist.” That’s the bread of angels: the mundane summoning the mystical. Patti Smith is the go-between, setting the vibration to language, trusting meaning will come.

It’s a spark poets and songwriters know well: sound as the seed of a world more felt than understood. In this latest in her series of gloriously transporting memoirs, Smith follows that scratch into the awkwardness and beauty of childhood, the place where “the kingdom of the infinite imagination” first opened beneath her feet.

Her earliest memories shimmer as if through a looking glass in the back of a w

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