Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Smith s signature voice?inquisitive, lyrical, and wry?turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory some collage an array of documents and voices and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith boldly ties America s contemporary moment both to our nation s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. ?from ''Unrest in Baton Rouge'' In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Love: naked almost in the everlasting street, Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean. SummaryEven the men in black armor, the ones Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else Are they so buffered against, if not love s blade Sizing up the heart s familiar meat? We watch and grieve.

Wade in the water poems