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Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Poetry requires acts of exquisite selection and distillation that Smith...performs with virtuosity and passion throughout her profoundly affecting fourth collection....The sacred and the malevolent are astutely juxtaposed in this beautifully formed, deeply delving, and caring volume." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Smith remains a master whose technical skill enhances her emotional facilities, one ever able to leave readers 'feeling pierced suddenly/ By pillars of heavy light.'" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"In these poems, with both gentleness and severity, Smith generously accepts what is an unusually public burden for an American poet, bringing national strife home, and finding the global in the local." NPR.org
Review
"Wade in the Water examines...injustice (political and personal) with sharp insight and telling detail....While Smith repeatedly calls injustice and its perpetrators to account, her poems her poems also contain deep compassion and an insistence on hope."Shelf Awareness
Review
"In lines that are as lyrical as they are wise...Smith makes connections between the current state of American culture and its history." BuzzFeed
Review
"Smith's poetry is an awakening itself." Vogue
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Tracy K. Smith is the author of three previous books of poetry: The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Other honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. In 2017, Smith was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of the Humanities and Director and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her family.
Tracy K. Smith on PowellsBooks.Blog
Every book Tracy K. Smith has published has won an award or received an honor. Her first book of poetry,
The Body's Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; her second,
Duende, won the James Laughlin Award; and her third,
Life on Mars, upped the ante and won the Pulitzer. Her memoir,
Ordinary Light, was a National Book Award finalist...
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