Wade in the water : poems /
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 voi...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Minneapolis :
Graywolf Press,
[2018].
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| Summary: | 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 83 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 77-81). |
| ISBN: | 9781555978136 1555978134 9781555978365 1555978363 |