POETRY & DRAMA NEW & SELECTED
I had to to separate my new books into categories of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. It’s a good problem to have — too many good books to feature. I am going to be discriminating and probably slow to work on the poetry page. I have a large poetry section in the store, but I have not considered most of it for listing before. Look forward to a steady and deliberate listing of a wide variety of poetry and lyrics books in the days to come.
Wade in the Water: Poems
Wade in the Water: Poems
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, Pulitzer Prize winner 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. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection includes erasures of the Declaration of Independence and correspondence between slave owners, a found poem composed 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.