Tracy K. Smith

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 poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, and where celebrities and pop stars walk among us....

Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival....

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"....