Such Color: New and Selected Poems

Product Description
“Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.” ―VogueCelebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even―and especially―in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred―urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
Review
“Haunting and vital, [Such Color is] the perfect encapsulation of a remarkable body of work.”―TIME“Both timeless and urgent, [Such Color] serves as a humbling and invigorating reawakening from sorrow and apathy.”―Publishers Weekly, starred review
About the Author
Tracy K. Smith is the author of
four books of poetry, including
Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and
Wade in the Water, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the poet laureate of the United States.