History is in a hurry,' writes Smith in her first collection since the Pulitzer-winning Life on Mars, and these lyrical meditations on class, environmental threat, and America's bloody heritage prove that the current U.S. 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. Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. Love: naked almost in the everlasting street, Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesĪre they so buffered against, if not love’s blade The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K.

Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Wade in the water poems