Wade in the Water: Poems

Wade in the Water: Poems

<p><b>Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize</b><br><b>Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection</b><br><b></b><br><b>The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States</b></p><p>Even the men in black armor, the ones<br>Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else</p><p>Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade<br>Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?</p><p>We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.<br>Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.</p><p>Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,<br>Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.</p><p>―from “Unrest in Baton Rouge”</p><p>In <i>Wade in the Water</i>, 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 <i>The Declaration of Independence</i> 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. <i>Wade in the Water</i> is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.</p>