M Train

In 1965 I had come to New York City from South Jersey just to roam around, and nothing seemed more romantic than to write poetry in a Greenwich Village café. I finally got the courage to enter Caffè Dante on MacDougal Street. The walls were covered with printed murals of the city of Florence and scenes from The Divine Comedy.
 
A few years later I would sit by a low window that looked out into a small alley, reading Mrabet s The Beach Café. A young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial codger who has a café with only one table and one chair on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The slow-moving atmosphere surrounding the café captivated me. Like Driss, I dreamed of opening a place of my own: the Café Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum.
 
I imagined threadbare Persian rugs on wide-planked floors, two long wood tables with benches, a few smaller tables, and an oven for baking bread. No music no menus. Just silence black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread. Photographs adorning the walls: a melancholic portrait of the café s namesake, and a smaller image of the forlorn poet Paul Verlaine in his overcoat, slumped before a glass of absinthe.
 
In 1978 I came into a little money and was able to pay a security deposit toward the lease of a one-story building on East Tenth Street. It had once been a beauty parlor but stood empty save for three white ceiling fans and a few folding chairs. My brother, Todd, and I whitewashed the walls and waxed the wood floors. Two wide skylights flooded the space with light. I spent several days sitting beneath them at a card table, drinking deli coffee and plotting my next move.
 
In the end I was obliged to abandon my café. Two years before, I had met the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit. It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life. My yearning for him permeated everything my poems, my

Patti Smith

This book is brilliant. A poetic, energetic search for the secret links between life and art and coffee. Henning Mankell

An eloquent and a deeply moving elegy for what she has lost and cannot find but can remember in words. The New York Times

Elegiac, melancholic, and meditative, filled with wistful flashbacks and haunting Polaroid snapshots. NPR

Begins in a tiny Greenwich Village cafe and ends as a dream requiem to the same place, encompassing an entire lost world. . . . Yet despite all of these losses, there is extraordinary joy here. . . . Readers who share in Smith s transcendent pilgrimage may find themselves reborn within the pages of this exquisite memoir. The Washington Post

[Smith] opens her extraordinary heart and soul to us, holding nothing back and never permitting vanity to intrude. It s a gift, this record of beloved absences, to which one can only respond: thank you. O, The Oprah Magazine

Weaves poetry, dreams, art, literature, and conversational fragments into a phantasmagoric, atmospheric, and transportive whole. . . . Brilliant. . . . Where Just Kids concerned Smith s hopefulness, hunger, callowness, and loss, M Train is about being lost and found. The Boston Globe

M Train is a great meditation on solitude, independence, age, a ride-along with the last Romantic standing. . . . Patti Smith inventories her inspirations, and makes her house out of the life lived, out of the love spent. USA Today 

M Train comes near to accomplishing Marcel Proust s goal to follow the workings of the human mind and the human heart. By the end of the book you know that nothing is everything, and that life is a labor of love. Harper s Bazaar

M Train is an impressionistic weave of dreams, disasters, and epiphanies, a meditation on life and art by a woman who sees them as one. Rolling Stone
 
A sublime collection of true stories concerning irredeemable loss, memory, travel, crime, coffee, books, and wild