Such Color; Tracy K. Smith

Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such 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 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.

October 5, 2021

About the Author

Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; 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 Princeton University.