Though Smith was already a prominent literary figure, her newest collection takes on the responsibility that comes with having a more public persona.Ī reflection on history and America’s current moment, Wade in the Water centers on a series of erasure poems in which the entirety of the poem is composed of words from a source text. She’s a professor and director of the creative writing program at Princeton University, and her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Recently appointed to a second term as laureate, Smith is an extraordinary writer who has collected major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection, 2011’s Life on Mars. Hers are poems that insist on compassion and love-poems of many voices and places across America. From the United States’ dark chapters of slavery to present-day acts of racial violence, Smith’s pieces consistently match the largeness of their content.

Wade, published in April, reads like a book a laureate should write these are poems that draw on weighty subjects and hinge on ideas of belonging. poet laureate and in her fourth collection of poetry, Wade in the Water, is rolling up her sleeves and excavating the basement of this old house. And I think that that’s what we’re called upon to do where we are right now.” Tracy K. Whatever you’re ignoring will be there to be reckoned with until you reckon with it.

“Our country is like a really old house,” the historian and journalist Isabel Wilkerson said in an interview barely a week after the 2016 election.

Tracy k smith wade in the water