There are brief, sweet scenes from her 14-year marriage, when she and Mr. As such, she has written a book that is memoirish, but not strictly a memoir. This peripatetic life is chronicled in “M Train,” a series of journeys through cities, hotels, dreams and memories. Next year, she’ll appear on a calendar, joining Yoko Ono, Serena Williams and other “iconic” women photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Pirelli, the Italian tire company. She performed at fund-raisers (for Tibet House and for the blast victims of last spring’s East Village fire), spoke at Amnesty International’s award ceremony in Berlin and cuddled the Dalai Lama at the Glastonbury Festival, where she led the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, who turned 80 a week later.

She gave an impromptu concert at an event sponsored by Dom Pérignon. She appeared on a Hudson River cruise with Karl Lagerfeld at Barneys for a book party for Ann Demeulemeester, the Belgian designer at Da Silvano’s 40th anniversary. There she was at a Sundance Film Festival party, the Golden Globe Awards, the Critics’ Choice Awards. Smith has seemed globally, impossibly, ubiquitous.

(The book’s commercial success also inspired a wave of memoirs by female rockers, like those of Chrissie Hynde and Kim Gordon, among others, out this year.) Smith won that year, that transmogrified the punk poet from downtown cult figure into someone more socially omnipresent, a cheerful participant in the larger cultural stew. It was the publication of “Just Kids” in 2010 and its National Book Award, which Ms. Smith, who spent her summer on a 45-city concert tour of Europe, is about to embark on an 18-city book tour, after which follows another grueling performance schedule that has her working, quite happily, into January. The book, out next week, is a sort of first salvo before the 40th anniversary of “ Horses,” the 68-year-old poet/rocker/visual artist/author’s historic first album. Those losses, and newer, fresher sorrows, pierce her elegiac new book, “ M Train,” which in its own elliptical way is as much a love story about her late husband as “ Just Kids,” her stunning 2010 memoir of youth and bohemia, was about Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith was still making peace with their absence. Smith lost her husband, the musician Fred Sonic Smith, to heart failure, and her brother, Todd Smith, who was also her road manager, to a stroke. In 1994, within the space of a few weeks, Ms.

My train patti smith