Smith’s first book Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize she served as U. Smith brings it all to the page, and hearing her read this book aloud made my day. I would love to know more about the process of writing these poems, or “creating” them, as some are erasures and others, collages of voices of slaves, and of Black Civil War soldiers and veterans. “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I will Tell You All About It,” one title promises us, and Smith delivers. It captures both transcendence and terror, life itself. “Luminous” seems overused, but I knew when I found the audio version of Wade in the Water, that I would have to try to write about it. “Choral arrangement” helps (beginning with the gospel title). I lack words enough to describe this book.

Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets. 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. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2019, 96 pages, $16 paper, For my last poet in #nationalpoetrymonth, this book is too perfect.

Wade in the water tracy k smith