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Book Title

Life on Mars

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Tracy K. Smith
Body
You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?

—from “No Fly Zone”
  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 envisions 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 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. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-584-5
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
88
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

About the Author

Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Harvard University.

https://tracyksmithpoet.com/


 
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Praise

  • A New York Times Notable Book of 2011
  • “As all the best poetry does, Life on Mars first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled.”—The New York Times Book Review 
  • “[Life on Mars] is by turns intimate, even confessional, regarding private life in light of its potential extermination, and resoundingly political, warning of a future that ‘isn’t what it used to be.’”—The New Yorker
  • “[W]hat’s most satisfying about [Life on Mars] is that . . . Ms. Smith shows us that she can play the minor keys, too. . . . [Her writing] reveals unknowable terrains: birth and death and love.”—The New York Times
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