Tracy K. Smith Selected Works

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul—searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new terminology of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, and the distance between Time Ago and Soon, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment and offers a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other and to the future.

Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while rising toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.

We are living through an unprecedented, revolutionary era. Across the country, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, homes, and their own lives to Covid-19. In the midst of the pandemic, historic protests erupted in the summer of 2020 over the constant brutality against Black Americans. Galvanizing and lyrical, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, captures and gives voice to all of the roiling sentiments of the moment in an anthology for the ages.

US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith has gathered this selection spanning her entire remarkable career. From the private experience of desire to the devastations of political strife, these poems enlarge our vocabulary for what it means to live, struggle, grieve and love.