Wade in the Water

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize<BR>Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection<BR><BR>The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States<BR><BR>Even the men in black armor, the ones<BR>Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else<BR><BR>Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade<BR>Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?<BR><BR>We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.<BR>Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.<BR><BR>Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,<BR>Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.<BR><BR>-from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"<BR><BR>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.