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. 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. Item number: 31735066849674

National Book Award Finalist. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God's plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. These dizzying juxtapositions--of her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and "ecstatic possibility," and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child's and teenager's perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home. Item number: 31735066849666

In this brilliant collection of new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant and revisits kitschy concepts like 'love' and 'illness', now relegated to the museum of obsolescence. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe, accompanying the discoveries, failures and oddities of human existence and establishing Smith as one of the best poets of her generation. Item number: 31735072369139

Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores the history and intersections of folk traditions and political resistance. One poem tells of a Ho-Chuk Indian boy, separated from his tribe by the government, another gives voice to Ugandan women kidnapped by rebel commanders. Duende gives passionate testament to the history of these cultures and others, allowing them to sing. Item number: 31735066849732

Recipient of the the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry prize for the best first book by an African American poet, The Body's Question confronts issues of loss, historical intersections between race and family and the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Item number: 31735052382045