Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States
Even the men in black armor, the ones Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else
Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?
We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat. Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.
Love: naked almost in the everlasting street, Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.
—from “Unrest in Baton Rouge”
In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Princeton University.
Table of Contents
I.
Garden of Eden 5
The Angels 6
Hill Country 8
Deadly 10
A Man's World 11
The World Is Your Beautiful Younger Sister 12
Realm of Shades 13
Driving to Ottawa 14
Wade in the Water 15
II.
Declaration 19
The Greatest Personal Privation 20
Unwritten 23
I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It 24
It’s the very first week of National Poetry Month and we know you might be wondering — how should you celebrate? What collections should you be reading? Who should you be reading? As always, we’ve got you covered. Our Poured Over podcast has welcomed myriad poets to talk about everything from collections of verse to […]
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives combines the beauty of a memoir with a grander look at America’s history and future. Smith joins us to talk about family and cultural identity, race and belonging, the importance of poetry and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. This episode of Poured Over […]