Gotta Go Gotta Flow

Patricia Smith is the author of six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2014 Rebekah Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress, the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam.

Michael Abramson (1948-2011) worked as a Chicago-based commercial and documentary photographer for nearly four decades starting in the early 1970s. He began photographing South Side nightlife in 1974. The South Side clubs became a link between Parisian bistros, a "secret, suspicious world closed to the uninitiated," he wrote. Abramson took the photos for this book in the 1970s, and always considered it his best work.