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| life on mars tracy k smith: Life on Mars Tracy K. Smith, 2017-01-10 Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize * Poet Laureate of the United States * * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter (Publishers Weekly, starred review) You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What Would your life say if it could talk? —from No Fly Zone With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like love and illness now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Ordinary Light Tracy K. Smith, 2015-03-31 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • This dazzling memoir from the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement.... Evocative ... luminous. —The Washington Post In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her remarkable story, giving us a quietly potent memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Wade in the Water Tracy K. Smith, 2018-04-03 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 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, 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. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Such Color Tracy K. Smith, 2021-10-05 “Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.” —Vogue Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even—and especially—in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief. Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Body's Question Tracy K. Smith, Kevin Young, 2017-09-05 The debut collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States * Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize * You are pure appetite. I am pure Appetite. You are a phantom In that far-off city where daylight Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone. --from Self-Portrait as the Letter Y The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, I was anyone I wanted to be. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Duende Tracy K. Smith, 2017-09-05 The award-winning second collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: American Journal Tracy K. Smith, 2018-09-04 A landmark anthology envisioned by Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States American Journal presents fifty contemporary poems that explore and celebrate our country and our lives. 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith has gathered a remarkable chorus of voices that ring up and down the registers of American poetry. In the elegant arrangement of this anthology, we hear stories from rural communities and urban centers, laments of loss in war and in grief, experiences of immigrants, outcries at injustices, and poems that honor elders, evoke history, and praise our efforts to see and understand one another. Taking its title from a poem by Robert Hayden, the first African American appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, American Journal investigates our time with curiosity, wonder, and compassion. Among the fifty poets included are: Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Matthew Dickman, Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Ilya Kaminsky, Robin Coste Lewis, Ada Límon, Layli Long Soldier, Erika L. Sánchez, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith, Susan Stewart, Mary Szybist, Natasha Trethewey, Brian Turner, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Glass Constellation Arthur Sze, 2021-04-13 This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet. —NPR National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions—employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species—Arthur Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Leaping Poetry Robert Bly, 2019-12-11 Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as riding on dragons. Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of leaping as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Transtromer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: There's a Revolution Outside, My Love Tracy K. Smith, John Freeman, 2021-05-11 This kaleidoscopic portrait of an unprecedented time brings together some of our most treasured writers today—Edwidge Danticat, Layli Long Soldier, Monica Youn, Julia Alvarez, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor—to give voice to the unthinkable grief and hopeful possibilities born in an era of revolution and change. “A maelstrom of grief, anger, fear and confusion, with glimmers of gratitude and hope: a comprehensive emotional document of a moment.”—New York Times Book Review Now is an extraordinary time. Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning. Drawing its title from a powerful letter to her son by Kirsten West Savali, the book fans out from there, offering a rich and intimate view of the change we underwent. Composed of searing letters, essays, poems, reflections, and screeds, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love highlights the work of some of our most powerful and insightful writers who hail from across a range of backgrounds and from almost all fifty states. Among them, these writers have brought home four Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, a fistful of Whitings, and numerous citations in best American poetry, short story, and essay compilations. They are noisy with beauty, and their pieces ring louder and clearer than ever before. Galvanizing and lyrical, this is a deeply profound anthology of writing filled with pain and beauty, warmth and intimacy. A remarkable feat of empathy, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love offers solace in a time of swirling protest, change, and violence—reminding us of the human scale of the upheaval, and providing hope for a kinder future. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Generations Lucille Clifton, 2021-11-16 A moving family biography in which the poet traces her family history back through Jim Crow, the slave trade, and all the way to the women of the Dahomey people in West Africa. Buffalo, New York. A father’s funeral. Memory. In Generations, Lucille Clifton’s formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, “born among the Dahomey people in 1822,” who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author’s grandmother. Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. “I look at my husband,” Clifton writes, “and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.” |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World Pádraig Ó. Tuama, 2022-12-06 “Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Eternity Tracy K. Smith, 2019-05-30 Tracy K. Smith's poetry seems to contain the whole universe. From the earliest work gathered here, we find the voices and experiences of women who have lived adventurously, who have travelled, desired, and found themselves drinking at bars with strangers in lands far from home; we find records of tenderness and of conflict, of the cruelty inflicted on humanity by humanity, and remarkable documentary work bearing witness to the victims of injustice, from a Native American boy separated from his family by the US Government to the girls kidnapped as 'wives' for rebel commanders in Uganda. This volume gathers the poet's selections from her four collections published since 2003, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars, which expands the scope still further, finding in outer space - and the work of David Bowie - a rich vein of questions about life and death, power and paternalism, and race; and Wade in the Water, whose explorations of motherhood and the destruction of the environment intertwine with verbatim histories of slavery and the American Civil War. These are sensuous, light-filled poems, capable of finding the luminous, the transcendent and a principle of love in even the most difficult of subjects. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: 3 Sections Vijay Seshadri, 2014-05-06 * Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry * The long-awaited third poetry book by Vijay Seshadri, one of the most respected poets working in America today (Time Out New York) Vijay Seshadri's new poetry is assured and expert, his line as canny as ever. In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life—a wayward history, an indeterminate future, and a present condition of wanting to outthink time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of America's best poets. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree Yi Lei, 2020-11-03 One of China’s most significant contemporary poets, co-translated by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith Yi Lei published her poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim—and with outrage—for her frank embrace of women’s erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree celebrate the joys of the body, ponder the miracle of compassion, and proclaim an abiding reverence for the natural world. Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this collection introduces American readers to a boundless spirit—one “composing an explosion.” |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Poetry 180 Billy Collins, 2003-03-25 A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Inspired by Billy Collins’s poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance. With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Blessen Margaret Simon, 2012-04-01 Ever since a hurricane sent a water oak through the roof of Pawpee's house crippling her grandfather, ten-year-old Blessen LaFleur has lived with her mother and grandfather in a FEMA trailer on True Friend Road in St. Martinville, La. An accident involving her pet chicken, Blue, pushes Blessen into discoveries about faith, death, and her heritage. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Life on Mars Jennifer Brown, 2014-08-05 Twelve-year-old Arcturus Betelgeuse Chambers comes from a family of stargazers and his quest to find life on other planets is unstoppable. But when Arty's family announces they're moving to Las Vegas, the City of Lights threatens to put an end to his stargazing dreams forever-especially when he has to stay with his scary next door neighbor while his parents look for a house. As it turns out, “Mr. Death” isn't terrifying at all-he's actually Cash Maddox, a bonafide astronaut! But when Cash falls ill, will Arty find the courage to complete his mission by himself? And might he actually prove, once and for all, that there is life on Mars? For fans of Frank Cottrell Boyce's Cosmic and Jack Gantos's Dead End in Norvelt comes a heartwarming story of true friendship-earthly or otherwise. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Worldly Things Michael Kleber-Diggs, 2021-06-08 Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry “Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.” In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.” Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics. Additional Recognition: A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Poetry Selection A Library Journal Poetry Title to Watch 2021 A Chicago Review of Books Poetry Collection to Read in 2021 A Reader's Digest 14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now Selection A Books Are Magic Recommended Reading Selection An Indie Gift Guide 2021 Indie Next Selection |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Odessa File Frederick Forsyth, 2011 Suspense fiction. Reissues of 7 of Forsyth's classic thrillers. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Discography Sean Singer, 2008-10-01 This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Sean Singer’s Discography. Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced, the poems in this book delight in sound and approach the more abstract pleasures of music. Singer takes as his subjects music, jazz figures, and historical events. Series judge W. S. Merwin praises Singer for his “roving demands on his language” and “the quick-changes of his invention in search of some provisional rightness.” |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Last Pictures Trevor Paglen, 2012-09-19 Human civilizations' longest lasting artifacts are not the great Pyramids of Giza, nor the cave paintings at Lascaux, but the communications satellites that circle our planet. In a stationary orbit above the equator, the satellites that broadcast our TV signals, route our phone calls, and process our credit card transactions experience no atmospheric drag. Their inert hulls will continue to drift around Earth until the Sun expands into a red giant and engulfs them about 4.5 billion years from now. The Last Pictures, co-published by Creative Time Books, is rooted in the premise that these communications satellites will ultimately become the cultural and material ruins of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, far outlasting anything else humans have created. Inspired in part by ancient cave paintings, nuclear waste warning signs, and Carl Sagan's Golden Records of the 1970s, artist/geographer and MacArthur Genius Fellow Trevor Paglen has developed a collection of one hundred images that will be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc. The disc, commissioned by Creative Time, will then be sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite in September 2012, as both a time capsule and a message to the future. The selection of 100 images, which are the centerpiece of the book, was influenced by four years of interviews with leading scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, and artists about the contradictions that characterize contemporary civilizations. Consequently, The Last Pictures engages some of the most profound questions of the human experience, provoking discourse about communication, deep time, and the economic, environmental, and social uncertainties that define our historical moment. Copub: Creative Time Books |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Whole Body Reset Stephen Perrine, Heidi Skolnik, AARP, 2023-12-26 The first-ever weight-loss plan specifically designed to stop-and reverse-age-related weight gain and muscle loss, while shrinking your belly, extending your life, and creating your healthiest self at mid-life and beyond-- |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Supernatural Love Gjertrud Schnackenberg, 2000-10-16 Collects late-twentieth-century poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg's first three books of poetry into one volume. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: I am Abraham Lincoln Brad Meltzer, 2014-01-14 Each picture book in this series is a biography of an American hero, told in a simple, conversational, vivacious way, and always focusing on a character trait that made the person heroic. The heros are depicted as children throughout, telling their life stories in first-person present tense, which keeps the books playful and accessible to young children. This book spotlights Abraham Lincoln who always spoke his mind and was unafraid to speak for others.This friendly, fun biography series inspired the PBS Kids TV show Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum. One great role model at a time, these books encourage kids to dream big. Included in each book are: • A timeline of key events in the hero’s history • Photos that bring the story more fully to life • Comic-book-style illustrations that are irresistibly adorable • Childhood moments that influenced the hero • Facts that make great conversation-starters • A virtue this person embodies: Abraham Lincoln's compassion made him a great leader. You’ll want to collect each book in this dynamic, informative series! |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Book of Hours Kevin Young, 2015-10-13 A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Mirror Talk Susanna Egan, 1999 A study of directions in autobiography. Traditional autobiography tends to originate in crisis but develops a resolution, whereas contemporary autobiography deals with unresolved crisis. The author examines works by a range of writers, including Primo Levi, Ernest Hemingway and Mary Meigs. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Rose Suzanne Wilson, 2021-10-27 A privileged chance to see Rose Uniacke's work in the form of a private tour of her London home-the crucible for all her design ideas-in her first book, produced as a limited edition of 2,500 copies. Airy and light, delicate and robust, grand and intimate, raw and luxurious: these are just some of the qualities and contradictions that resonate within the work and home of Rose Uniacke. This sumptuous volume, the first on the designer, has been conceived with Uniacke to her bespoke specifications. Masterfully photographed by François Halard, the book unfolds gatefold after gatefold as a series of privileged glimpses inside Uniacke's home, with the designer's own words as our guide-an intimate and exclusive portrait of a home rarely gained access to as well as a window onto the workings of one of our leading design minds. Her work is distinguished by warmth, character, and an extraordinary serenity, and mirroring these qualities the book is a luxury object made from some of the same materials featured in Uniacke's home: a unique cotton duck canvas slipcase houses the book itself, which is wrapped in pure new wool. Completing this indispensable book in design history are texts from the architect of Uniacke's home, Vincent Van Duysen, and her landscape architect, Tom Stuart-Smith. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Rapture Sjohnna McCray, 2016-04-05 Because I can never say anything plainly. Because I always stutter politely. Because there's always the chatter before the kiss. --from In Need of Subtitles In this award-winning debut, Sjohnna McCray movingly recounts a life born out of wartime to a Korean mother and an American father serving during the Vietnam War. Their troubled histories, and McCray's own, are told with lyric passion and the mythic undercurrents of discovering one's own identity, one's own desires. What emerges is a self- and family portrait of grief and celebration, one that insists on our lives as anything, please, but singular. Rapture is an extraordinary first collection, with poems of rare grace and feeling. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Leaving Gee's Bend Irene Latham, 2017-03-01 Ludelphia Bennett may be blind in one eye, but that doesn't mean she can't put in a good stitch. In fact, Ludelphia sews all the time, especially when things are going wrong. But when Mama gets deathly ill, it doesn't seem like even quilting will help. Mama needs medicine badly—medicine that can only be found in Camden, over forty miles away. That's when Ludelphia decides to do something drastic—leave Gee's Bend. Beyond the cotton fields of her small sharecropping community, Ludelphia discovers a world she never imagined, but there's also danger lurking for a young girl on her own. Set in 1932 and inspired by the rich quilting traditions of Gee's Bend, Alabama, Leaving Gee's Bend is a delightful story of a young girl facing a brave new world, presented in a new paperback edition. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Math Campers Dan Chiasson, 2020-09-22 A father and husband's meditation on love, adolescence, and the mysterious mechanisms of poetic creation, from the acclaimed poet. The poet's art is revealed in stages in this making-of book, where we watch as poems take shape--first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world. In the long poem Must We Mean What We Say, a woman reader narrates in prose the circumstances behind poems and snippets of poems she receives in letters from a stranger. Who made up whom? Chiasson, an acclaimed poetry critic, has invented a remarkable structure where the reader and a poet speak to one another, across the void of silence and mystery. He is also the father of teenaged sons, and this volume continues the autobiographical arc of his prior, celebrated volumes. One long section is about the age of thirteen and the dawning of desire, while the title poem looks at the crucial age of fifteen and the existential threat of climate change and gun violence, which alters the calculus of adolescence. Though the outlook is bleak, these poems register the glories of our moment: that there are places where boys can kiss each other and not be afraid; that small communities are rousing and taking care of each other; that teenagers have mobilized for a better world. All of these works emerge from the secretive imagination of a father as he measures his own adolescence against that of his sons and explores the complex bedrock of marriage. Chiasson sees a perilous world both navigated and enriched by the passionate young and by the parents--and poets--who care for them. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: What Work Is Philip Levine, 2011-08-31 Winner of the National Book Award in 1991 “This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Don't Call Us Dead Danez Smith, 2017-09-05 Digte. Addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Best American Poetry 2021 David Lehman, 2021-09-28 The 2021 edition of the leading collection of contemporary American poetry is guest edited by the former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, providing renewed proof that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a choice of the year’s most memorable poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. The guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2021 is Tracy K. Smith, the former United States Poet Laureate, whose own poems are, Toi Derricotte’s words, “beautiful and serene” in their surfaces with an underlying “sense of an unknown vastness.” In The Best American Poetry 2021, Smith has selected a distinguished array of works both vast and beautiful by such important voices as Henri Cole, Billy Collins, Louise Erdrich, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes, and Kevin Young. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: The Lost Arabs Omar Sakr, 2020-01-14 Award-winning Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr presents a pulsating collection of poetry that interrogates the bonds and borders of family, faith, queerness, and nationality. Visceral and energetic, Sakr’s poetry confronts the complicated notion of “belonging” when one’s family, culture, and country are at odds with one’s personal identity. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a fierce, urgent collection from a distinct new voice. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Mars Poetica Wyn Cooper, 2018-03-06 The poems in Mars Poetica examine the conscious and unconscious ways we comprehend both the world around us and the one inside. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Leaving Saturn Major Jackson, 2002-01-01 Leaving Saturn, chosen by Al Young as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, is an ambitious and honest collection. Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spirit of resilience, courage, and creativity he witnessed among his family, neighbors, and friends while growing up in Philadelphia. His poems hauntingly reflect urban decay and violence, yet at the same time they rejoice in the sustaining power of music and the potency of community. Jackson also honors artists who have served as models of resistance and maintained their own faith in the belief of the imagination to alter lives. The title poem, a dramatic monologue in the voice of the American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra, details such a humane program and serves as an admirable tribute to the tradition of African American art. Throughout, Jackson unflinchingly portrays our most devastated landscapes, yet with a vividness and compassion that expose the depth of his imaginative powers. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: I Love You the Purplest Barbara M. Joosse, 1996-09 Two boys discover that their mother loves them equally but in different ways. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Elegy Larry Levis, 1997 A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had an all-but-completed manuscript of poems. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus's ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden - the horses, the migrant workers - are worked toward death; a world in which Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work./ It works for almost nothing; a world in which you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, /Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't. |
| life on mars tracy k smith: Writers & Company Eleanor Wachtel, 1993 |
Life on Mars (poetry collection) - Wikipedia
Life on Mars is a poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The collection is an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Life on Mars: Poems by Tracy K. Smith | Goodreads
10 May 2011 · Life on Mars: Poems. Tracy K. Smith. 4.10. 9,502 ratings1,138 reviews. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence.
Life on Mars: Poems: Amazon.co.uk: Tracy K. Smith: …
Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars is a powerful collection that deftly explores themes of family, loss, and the mysteries of the universe. The poems navigate between the personal and the cosmic, making profound connections between the two.
Life on Mars: Poems: Amazon.co.uk: Tracy K. Smith: …
21 Jul 2011 · 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 - Graywolf Press
In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.
Amazon.com: Life on Mars: Poems: 9781555975845: Smith, Tracy K…
10 May 2011 · In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to …
Life On Mars by Tracy K. Smith - Waterstones
10 May 2011 · 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. Publisher: Graywolf Press,U.S. ISBN: 9781555975845. Number of pages: 80. Weight: 147 g.
Life on Mars: Poems - Tracy K. Smith - Google Books
10 May 2011 · In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both...
Tracy K. Smith | The Poetry Foundation
Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was ...
Life on Mars: Poems eBook : Smith, Tracy K.: Amazon.com.au: …
In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.
Life on Mars (poetry collection) - Wikipedia
Life on Mars is a poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The collection is an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Life on Mars: Poems by Tracy K. Smith | Goodreads
10 May 2011 · Life on Mars: Poems. Tracy K. Smith. 4.10. 9,502 ratings1,138 reviews. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence.
Life on Mars: Poems: Amazon.co.uk: Tracy K. Smith: …
Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars is a powerful collection that deftly explores themes of family, loss, and the mysteries of the universe. The poems navigate between the personal and the cosmic, making profound connections between the two.
Life on Mars: Poems: Amazon.co.uk: Tracy K. Smith: …
21 Jul 2011 · 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 - Graywolf Press
In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.
Amazon.com: Life on Mars: Poems: 9781555975845: Smith, Tracy K…
10 May 2011 · In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of …
Life On Mars by Tracy K. Smith - Waterstones
10 May 2011 · 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. Publisher: Graywolf Press,U.S. ISBN: 9781555975845. Number of pages: 80. Weight: 147 g.
Life on Mars: Poems - Tracy K. Smith - Google Books
10 May 2011 · In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both...
Tracy K. Smith | The Poetry Foundation
Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was ...
Life on Mars: Poems eBook : Smith, Tracy K.: …
In these brilliant 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 the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.
