Wade in the Water

by Tracy K. Smith

Overview

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize

Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States

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?

We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.

Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555978136
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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. She teaches at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

I

Garden of Eden 5

The Angels 6

Hill Country 8

Deadly 10

A Man's World 11

The World Is Your Beautiful Younger Sister 12

Realm of Shades 13

Driving to Ottawa 14

Wade in the Water 15

II

Declaration 19

The Greatest Personal Privation 20

Unwritten 23

I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It 24

Ghazal 38

III

The United States Welcomes You 41

New Road Station 42

Theatrical Improvisation 43

Unrest in Baton Rouge 46

Watershed 47

Political Poem 54

IV

Eternity 59

Ash 62

Beatific 63

Charity 64

In Your Condition 65

4½ 66

Dusk 68

Urban Youth 70

The Everlasting Self 71

Annunciation 72

Refuge 73

An Old Story 75

Notes 77

Acknowledgments 83

Editorial Reviews

What I have always liked about Smith's poetry is her interest in other people's lives. The lone self has been the sacred cow of lyric poetry since the ancient Greeks, and there's no way to sever that link permanently, but a vacation now and then from self-absorption to look around and see what the rest of the human race has been up to can do wonders to one's poetry…The poems in Wade in the Water 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 poems here about the country's shameful history of racism and injustice, and the ones about the treatment of recent immigrants and refugees, will probably attract most of the attention—and they ought to. It's rare for a sitting poet laureate to release a collection of new work during her term, and here Smith is forcefully addressing some of the nation's enduring wounds. But Wade in the Water is not only a political book. It asks how an artist might navigate the political and the personal, and the collection's real strength lies in its many marvelous poems that are more private…

The New York Times Book Review - Charles Simic

Smith's new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America's original racial sins—open wounds that have had insectlike eggs repeatedly laid in them—and apprehension about history's direction…There is a sense in this volume that our better angels will need to become rowdier. They will need to know how to handle themselves in a brawl.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 03/19/2018
History is in a hurry,” writes Smith in her first collection since the Pulitzer-winning Life on Mars, and these lyrical meditations on class, environmental threat, and America’s bloody heritage prove that the current U.S. poet laureate is plenty capable of keeping up with that “ship forever setting sail.” Readers familiar with Smith’s work will feel at home in “this dark where the earth floats.” Some poems inhabit a more boldly theological space than does previous work, yet Smith’s sense of the numinous stays appealingly grounded, as when she describes the “everlasting self” as “Gathered, shed, spread, then/ Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love/ From a lifetime ago, and mud/ A dog has tracked across the floor.” Whether presenting a sardonic erasure of the Declaration of Independence or dramatizing the correspondence between black Civil War soldiers and their wives, Smith nimbly balances lyricism and direct speech. In “Annunciation,” she boldly states, “I’ve turned old. I ache most/ To be confronted by the real,/ the pitiless, the bleak.” But a wry playfulness leavens her weightier concerns, and she leaves a small window open on her private self: “Flying home, I snuck a wedge of brie, and wept/ Through a movie starring Angelina Jolie.” Smith remains a master whose technical skill enhances her emotional facilities, one ever able to leave readers “feeling pierced suddenly/ By pillars of heavy light.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

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 Wade in the Water 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 these poems, with both gentleness and severity, Smith generously accepts what is an unusually public burden for an American poet, bringing national strife home, and finding the global in the local.”—NPR.org

“With formal precision and clarity, Smith’s poems dance the boundaries between private and public, give voice to the voiceless, and shine with a resolute spiritual vision.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“[Wade in the Water] considers the state of the union with characteristic grace. . . . Smith holds this chorus together quite beautifully, often embedding contrasting fragments of text and tone in classical forms and schemes.”—Harper’s

“Smith is the country’s poetic caretaker, calling both for collective reckoning and collective empathy.”—The Atlantic

“Wade in the Water . . . deftly covers 250 years of the American experience, from the refugee’s plight to a company’s toxic spill tothe complications of black motherhood.”—Mother Jones

“In lines that are as lyrical as they are wise . . . Smith makes connections between the current state of American culture and its history.”—BuzzFeed

“Deftly, Tracy K. Smith—the reigning poet laureate of the United States—illuminates America’s generational wounds.”—New York Magazine

“Tracy K. Smith presents a clear-eyed portrait of the present, reconsiders the past and offers love as an ethical response to injustice. . . . As Smith traverses time and tragedy, she returns to the idea that love is a radical and transformative force, one with a political and public function.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“We are in good worlds with Smith leading the poetic charge, as Wade in the Water attests.”—The Millions

“The poems in Wade in the Water are—in classic Smith fashion—gorgeously nuanced in music and in feeling and occasionally offbeat in their logic. . . . Smith lands on the power of art and its ability to pierce us ‘suddenly / By pillars of heavy light.’”—Poets.org

“Majestic. . . . This is a formally varied, masterful collection from the nation’s poet laureate.”—BookPage

“Bolstered by an array of sources, the poems gaze outward and observe with an incredibly perceptive eye. The past presses up against the present, and empathy hums consistently below as a driving force behind the collection’s explorations of religion, history, prejudice, and environmentalism.”—The Adroit Journal

“Readers will be moved by this carefully crafted collection. It is entirely new and innovative.”—New York Journal of Books

“Wade in the Water examines . . . injustice (political and personal) with sharp insight and telling detail. . . . While Smith repeatedly calls injustice and its perpetrators to account, her poems her poems also contain deep compassion and an insistence on hope.”—Shelf Awareness

“Tracy K. Smith weaves together past and present, personal and political in ways that are at once urgent and timeless.”—The Arkansas International

“On a craft level, these poems are impeccable. . . . I know brilliance when I read it and this book is brilliant.”—Roxane Gay, Goodreads

“Poetry requires acts of exquisite selection and distillation that Smith, poet laureate of the United States, performs with virtuosity and passion throughout her profoundly affecting fourth collection. . . . The sacred and the malevolent are astutely juxtaposed in this beautifully formed, deeply delving, and caring volume.”—Booklist, starred review

“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 (UK)

From the Publisher

★ 07/01/2018
In the newest work by America's current Poet Laureate Smith (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars), the personal and political, historical and contemporary merge in a collection that not only addresses issues the United States is facing today—attitudes toward immigrants in "The United States Welcomes You" and water poisoned by corporate greed and indifference in "Watershed," for example—but also gives voice to enslaved people in the Civil War era. What in lesser hands could be jarring here becomes a lyric tapestry, weaving poems created from the actual writings of the enslaved together with highly personal and immediate works. This allows listeners to come to understand that seemingly disparate events and experiences are, in many ways, connected on a very human level. The poems themselves are artful in the best meaning of the word; this is a writer working at the height of her craft. That these poems are then read by Smith herself gives them an extra vibrancy, allowing listeners to hear the nuances of meter and stresses as the poet wishes us to hear them. VERDICT A powerful collection that highlights all of Smith's strengths as a poet. Highly recommended. ["Technically accomplished and precisely attuned to our current cultural climate, Smith, like William Butler Yeats, once again demonstrates how an engaged, activist poetry need not forgo lyricism, compassion, and complexity to be effective": LJ 2/15/18 review of the Graywolf hc.]—Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn

Library Journal

Poet laureate Tracy Smith’s steady and deliberate narration has a sort of automated-sounding rhythm that works. Her poetry collection addresses both contemporary and historical issues that the United States has faced and continues to face. In a slightly pleading tone and unhurried pace, Smith unfolds the disheartening experiences of an African-American soldier in the Civil War and an immigrant being mistreated in the present day. Her works revolve around the theme of visibility and invisibility. While the tone of her narration may offer delicacy in her depictions of our nation, her words themselves are hard and concrete. A profound collection. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile