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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. In 2017 she was named Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University.Smith's new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America's original racial sins . . . and apprehension about history's direction. . . . These historical poems have a homely, unvarnished sort of grace
The New York Times
The poems in <i>Wade in the Water</i> are full of memorable images nimbly put together by Smith's exquisite sense of timing and her feel for the kind of language appropriate to the poem.
The New York Times Book Review
Smith brings great intelligence and sensitivity to her poems, leading readers deeper into other people's stories and ultimately into their own humanity.
The Washington Post
Smith's poetry is an awakening itself
Vogue
In lines that are as lyrical as they are wise . . . Smith makes connections between the current state of American culture and its history
BuzzFeed
Smith is the country's poetic caretaker, calling both for collective reckoning and collective empathy
The Atlantic
On a craft level, these poems are impeccable. . . . I know brilliance when I read it and this book is brilliant
- Roxane Gay,
For Smith, poetry is hospitable: accommodating whatever she is moved to write. Her work witnesses, protests and raises its own roof. . . . Smith emerges as a poet in charge of her own creation myth and a recorder of destructive realities
The Observer
Her work witnesses, protests and raises its own roof.... Excellent and bracing
- Kate Kellaway, Observer
Powerful and tender
Elle
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018
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?
In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. 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. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.