" 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.”
