Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, The Body's Question debuts Tracy K. Smith's ambitious and engaging new voice
The Body's Question
Poems
- “This is a smart, daring first book of poems. Driven by Smith’s raging desire of imagination, many of these often quiet poems describe something that’s not there with deft grammar reaching toward possibility. Simple language, yet deceptively striking, and intelligent poems.”—Listed as one of eight best poetry books in Black Issues Book Review
You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
—from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"
The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
—from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"
The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."
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About the Author
Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Credit: Melanie Dunea
Praise
- “Smith takes a counterintuitive stance on everything from race to adolescence.”—SAVOY
- “A spare, honest, and insightful debut verse collection.”—Essence
- “THE BODY’S QUESTION is an answer to pure passion, but the beauty is that the brain isn’t divorced from the body. The strength of character in these marvelous poems delights and questions. Here’s a voice that can weave beauty and terror into one breath, and the unguarded revelations are never verbal striptease.”—Yusef Komunyakaa
- “How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith’s debut collection. Smith’s work is deceptively plainspoken, but these are poems that are powerfully wrought, inspiring in all the clarity of their many gospel truths. The Body's Question announces a remarkable new voice, brilliantly bundled, ingeniously belted down.”—Lucie Brock-Broido
Acknowledgements
This book is made possible, in part, through the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a first-book award dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by African American poets, and by the generosity of Graywolf Press donors like you.
