What does it mean to be free in America today? How can we reconcile the ideals of liberty and democracy with the realities of racism, violence, and inequality? How can we heal the wounds of our troubled history and create a more just and inclusive society? These are some of the questions that animate this provocative and inspiring book by one of America's most acclaimed poets and public intellectuals. Drawing on her personal journey as well as her engagement with literature, art, history, and politics, Tracy K. Smith offers a vision of freedom that is both critical and hopeful, challenging us to confront our past and present struggles while imagining new possibilities for the future. With grace, courage, and wisdom, she invites us all to join her in freeing the captives of our own making.

Tracy K. Smith explores America’s present and past with a keen eye and a lyrical voice in Wade in the Water, a collection of poems that connects our contemporary moment to our nation’s complex history and to a sense of the eternal. These are poems of varying scale: some capture a glimpse of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some transcend the known world into the mystical, the sacred. Smith’s distinctive voice―curious, lyrical, and wry―examines what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture mediated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, personal utterance becomes part of a larger collective voice as the collection includes erasures of The Declaration of Independence and letters from African American soldiers in the Civil War, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, and a sequence based on testimonies of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a powerful and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.

In Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith imagines a soundtrack for the universe with poems that evoke David Bowie and interplanetary travel. She explores the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence in a sci-fi future devoid of real dangers. She also 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. This collection won Smith the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

The Body’s Question by Tracy K. Smith is a debut poetry collection that won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. In these poems, Smith confronts loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood. She gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until she can say, “I was anyone I wanted to be.”