Wade in the Water: Poems
Tracy K. Smith
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars
4.13
· 16 ratings · 95 pages · Published: 03 Apr 2018
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.
Tagged as:
- contemporary 3
- protagonists of colour 2
- social commentary 2
- civil war 2
- political 2
- historical 1
- college/university 1
- slavery 1
- black mc 1
- Add topics
- format - reader age
- non-fiction 3
- audiobook 3
- content warnings
- racism 1