Wade in the Water: Poems

By: Tracy K. Smith

Narrated by: 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 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.

©2018 Tracy K. Smith (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Interesting

This is some great work, by a woman I did not realize is the official poet laureate of the United States. Until now. And I can see why, cause this is an awesome collection!!!

Brings the Reader to tears!

One word: Powerful! She evokes the land that is America in Hill Country, the sadness and frustration of Black Slaves and Union Soldiers recruited unpaid to fight in The Civil War and ties them to the Lies and Broken Laws of Arrogant Corporations destroying West Virginia, the Cruel, Arrogant abuse of Immigrants and Daily Homelife during the Pandemic!

The lyrical recitation of Slave Letters and Documents may not be poetic but it sings off the page like a Chorus of Pain and Betrayal. That alone justifies this work.

An appeal for sanity in the 21st century

Poems of racial strife past and present), corporate greed, pollution--Smith is hard-hitting, passionately angry but not unwelcome.
Terrific poems.

Bedtime story

This will put you to sleep. There was little if any word emphasizing. The tone was so monotonous that I could barely focus in a truly coherent or attentive manner. Again this could have been a bedtime story if slave letters were meant to be a bedtime story.