![]() ![]() Wade in the Water is a powerful and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets. ![]() Here, personal utterance becomes part of a larger collective voice as the collection includes erasures of The Declaration of Independence and letters from African American soldiers in the Civil War, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, and a sequence based on testimonies of recent immigrants and refugees. Smith’s distinctive voice―curious, lyrical, and wry―examines what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture mediated by wealth, men, and violence. These are poems of varying scale: some capture a glimpse of song or memory some collage an array of documents and voices and some transcend the known world into the mystical, the sacred. ![]() Smith explores America’s present and past with a keen eye and a lyrical voice in Wade in the Water, a collection of poems that connects our contemporary moment to our nation’s complex history and to a sense of the eternal. ![]()
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