Life on Mars

With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith imagines a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, 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 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 Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself as among the best poets of her generation.

“[Life on Mars] blends pop culture, history, elegy, anecdote, and sociopolitical commentary to illustrate the weirdness of contemporary living. . . . The title poem, which includes everything from ‘dark matter’ and ‘a father.../ who kept his daughter/ Locked in a cell for decades’ to Abu Ghraib is proof that life is far stranger and more haunting than fiction.”

“Despite it’s otherworldly title, Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars is inextricably rooted in a reality that nevertheless has the capacity to astound. Yes, she takes us cavorting in the cosmos to ponder questions of magic and mortality—but, back on earth, her wrenching sequence on the death of her father is a tour de force of unleashed pain and reflection. Experiencing this extraordinary work, and wondering how best to summarize its deep shimmer, I kept returning to one of volume’s most ambitious poems. Its title is just how I feel about Tracy K. Smith’s latest triumph: ‘My God, it’s full of stars.’”