These startling contrasts–between her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future–will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and 'ecstatic possibility,' and her desire to become a writer. But after a summer in Alabama at her grandmother’s house, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means to be black: from her mother’s memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father’s field for pennies a bushel, to her parents’ involvement in the Civil Rights movement. Smith grew up as the youngest of five children in suburban California, loved by her parents who taught her to believe in God. Smith tells her remarkable story in Ordinary Light, a memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Wade in the Water is a powerful and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets. Here, personal utterance becomes part of a larger collective voice as the collection includes erasures of The Declaration of Independence and letters from African American soldiers in the Civil War, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, and a sequence based on testimonies of recent immigrants and refugees. Smith’s distinctive voice―curious, lyrical, and wry―examines what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture mediated by wealth, men, and violence. These are poems of varying scale: some capture a glimpse of song or memory some collage an array of documents and voices and some transcend the known world into the mystical, the sacred.

Smith explores America’s present and past with a keen eye and a lyrical voice in Wade in the Water, a collection of poems that connects our contemporary moment to our nation’s complex history and to a sense of the eternal.

With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.Tracy K. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like love and illness now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.

With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith