Showing results by author "Tracy Smith" in All Categories

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

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.

Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

LeBron James is a standout forward in the NBA. Learn about his childhood and his rise to becoming a basketball superstar.

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. 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'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. 

En "Vida en Marte", reconocido por el New York Times Book Reviewcomo uno de los poemarios más destacados del 2001 y galardonado en 2012 con el prestigioso Premio Pulitzer de Poesía, Tracy K. Smith imagina una banda sonora para el universo. Su poesía, con referencias tomadas de David Bowie y de la ciencia ficción, acompaña a los hallazgos y fallos de la existencia humana para sugerirnos que lo importante no es tanto descubrir los enigmas del universo, sino asumir su misterio.

The Subway Stairs was written to be a thought provoking story about personal safety on the fringes of life. It's meant to bring to light the problems encountered when innocent law abiding citizens are put in extreme life threatening situations with no immediate protection from a government entity (the police). Being a country governed by laws we have very few rights left for self defense. In many cases our right to self defense is governed by a state that has little or no regard for your personal safety.

As scholars of African American literature and cultural history, Bennett and McCarthy repeatedly find themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they come across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals, whose work has been neglected and, in some cases, entirely ignored, even by those academic circles devoted to the study of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that addresses this problem by recovering archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

 Jonathan Toews is a standout center in the NHL. Learn about his childhood and his rise to becoming a hockey superstar. 

Mike Trout is a standout MLB outfielder. Learn about his childhood and his rise to becoming a baseball superstar. 

Aaron Rodgers is a standout NFL quarterback. Learn about his childhood and his rise to becoming a football superstar.

Stress. The word alone is likely to spur fond (or not so fond) memories of past stress-invoking events such as important exams, business meetings, or first dates, to name a few. What these events all have in common is their ability to bring on a feeling of anxiety and tension. However you slice it, stress is an inevitable human experience that can be beneficial in limited amounts, and detrimental if left uncontrolled or unmanaged. In this book, you will learn what stress is, what the most common stressors are, and what the effects can be if left untreated.