Adrianna Smith Looks Into Tracy K. Smith's Wade in the Water at The Atlantic

At The Atlantic, Adrianna Smith discusses Tracy K. Smith's newest collection, Wade in the Water. For Smith, the nation's poet laureate who is embarking on her second term, the country is awash with history and circumstances that ripple through her verse. "Hers are poems that insist on compassion and love—poems of many voices and places across America," Adrianna Smith explains. From there: 

Recently appointed to a second term as laureate, Smith is an extraordinary writer who has collected major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection, 2011’s Life on Mars. She’s a professor and director of the creative writing program at Princeton University, and her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Though Smith was already a prominent literary figure, her newest collection takes on the responsibility that comes with having a more public persona.

A reflection on history and America’s current moment, Wade in the Water centers on a series of erasure poems in which the entirety of the poem is composed of words from a source text. This structure allows the voices of those Smith wishes to honor, and sometimes challenge, to speak for themselves. What emerges is deeply poignant commentary on the violence done to black Americans. For example, “Declaration,” which uses as its source text the Declaration of Independence, opens with “He has / sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.”

Continue on at The Atlantic.