Smith bends the line between poetry, story telling, and prose, and makes even the most basic of her poems a joy to read.įor the rest of 2018, I will be happy if I read ten specially earmarked books that I have been either looking forward to for a long time or are pure comfort reads. The most prolific work was that detailing African American soldiers during the Civil War and their ongoing postwar battle to obtain the same rights and pensions as their Caucasian contemporaries. She included a touching ode to her daughter written in a simple rhyming schematic and contrasted it with pieces about the current state of immigration and ethnic profiling. Smith's work is that good.Īnalyzing her work will not do justice to it but I will say that after not reading for over a month these thought provoking poems were a compromise to ease back into reading.

If you haven't read any of her prior work, I encourage everyone to read one or all of her poetry collections. Smith is deserving of her role as poet laureate and is one of the leading poets of this generation. Last year I read her other three collections as well as her memoir and was mesmerized by her work.

One of these game changers is Wade in the Water: Poems, a new collection by current US Poet Laureate, Tracy K Smith. I opted out of all of my challenges, and culled my to read pile down to just those books that I am genuinely interested in or are what I called award winning game changers. This year is being devoted to family celebrations and just being with family so reading is going to be at a premium. The year actually got off to a great start and then real life got in the way. With a reading plan in place to complete a number of fun and rewarding challenges, 2018 looked bright. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets. 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. 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.

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 boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K.

Wade in the water tracy smith