Wade in the Water

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 loveΓÇÖs blade
Sizing up the heartΓÇÖs 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.

ΓÇöfrom ΓÇ£Unrest in Baton RougeΓÇ¥

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties AmericaΓÇÖs contemporary moment both to our nationΓÇÖs 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. SmithΓÇÖs signature voiceΓÇöinquisitive, lyrical, and wryΓÇöturns 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 survivorsΓÇÖ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of AmericaΓÇÖs essential poets.