Reviews of Duende

“[Smith’s] lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter under the considerable weight of her subject matter.” —✩Publishers Weekly

“These poems make a ritual for forgiveness, insight and regeneration. This collection by Tracy K. Smith is a true merging of the ancient roots of poetry with the language of an age of a different kind of sense. Stunning.” —Joy Harjo

“Tracy K. Smith synthesizes the riches of many discursive and poetic traditions without regard to doctrine and with great technical rigor. Her poems are mysterious but utterly lucid and write a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision. They are deeply satisfying and necessarily inconclusive. And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious. Writers and musicians have explored the concept of duende, which might in English translate to a kind of existential blues. Smith is not interested in sadness, per se. Rather, in the strange music of these poems I think Smith is trying to walk us close to the edge of death-in-life, the force of hovering death in both the personal and social realms, admitting its inevitability and sometimes-proximity, and understand its manifestations in quotidian acts. This dark force is nonetheless a life force, which, in the poem “Flores Woman,” concludes “Like a dark star. I want to last.” If Duende were wine it would certainly be red; if edible, it would be meat cooked rare, coffee taken black, stinky cheese, bittersweet chocolate. Tracy K. Smith’s music is wholly her own, and Duende is a dolorous, beautiful book.” —Elizabeth Alexander, judge’s statement for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets

“Passionate and political.” —Rosemary Herbert, Star Tribune