Wade in the Water Poems Author:Tracy K. Smith The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the ones — Jangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love?s blade — Sizing up the heart?s familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat. — Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.... more »Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.?from ?Unrest in Baton Rouge?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.« less