Audiobooks by Tracy K. Smith

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might-together-come to a new view of our shared past "A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting." -Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again 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 Smith's own words, "To write a book about Black strength, Black continuance, and the powerful forms of belief and community that have long bolstered the soul of my people, I used the generations of my own patrilineal family to lean backward toward history, to gather a fuller sense of the lives my own ancestors led, the challenges they endured, and the sources of hope and bolstering they counted on. What this process has led me to believe is that all of us, in the here and now, can choose to work alongside the generations that precede us in tending to America's oldest wounds and meeting the urgencies of our present." To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith's father's family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero's record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life. Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?

Tracy K. Smith (Author), Tracy K. Smith (Narrator)

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Vide en Marte (Life on Mars)

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. No obstante, todos buscamos respuestas, en la religión, en la ciencia, en el arte; pero la interrogación continúa viva, no se cierra, especialmente cuando nos enfrentamos a la pérdida y al duelo. Es por ello que Smith, que escribió estos poemas tras la muerte de su padre (ingeniero en el Telescopio Hubble), construye su metáfora marciana: el espacio exterior, sinónimo de lo que puede llegar a conocerse, en el que su padre se ha desvanecido. Reivindica el poder de la ciencia como medida de reflexión en tiempos en que nada alcanza a ser lo que es pues todo es eternamente cambiante, eleva la vista a las estrellas, pero enfoca la lente de su telescopio en lo concreto, lo íntimo, incluso lo doméstico. Vida en Marte consolida a Tracy K. Smith como una de las mejores voces de su generación.

Tracy K. Smith (Author), Adriana Sananes (Narrator)

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The Body's Question: Poems

The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. 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."

Tracy K. Smith (Author), Tracy K. Smith (Narrator)

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Wade in the Water: Poems

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. 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. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

Tracy K. Smith (Author), Tracy K. Smith (Narrator)

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Life on Mars: Poems

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. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

Tracy K. Smith (Author), Tracy K. Smith (Narrator)

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Ordinary Light: A Memoir

Positioning Statement From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Description Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel, to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions--between her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and "ecstatic possibility," and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God's plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet's precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home. Key Selling Points - ACCLAIM: The narrative debut of a critics' darling whose name is instantly recognizable among reviewers. Parts of this memoir expand, in prose, upon the elegy for Smith's father that was the centerpiece of her most recent, Pulitzer-winning collection, Life on Mars, which was also a New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York TimesNotable Book of 2011, and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. - AUTHOR: Smith is a brilliant and charismatic presence who has lectured widely across the U.S. Her frankness about herself and her family in Ordinary Light will attract reader engagement, book-group discussion, and the review community. - MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY: The memoir, framed by the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, is perfect for Mother's Day. - EVOCATIVE PROSE: Smith conjures her home and family with vivid, visceral imagery and a richly textured sense of place in a wholly accessible voice. She skillfully combines a child's and teenager's perceptions with adult retrospection, giving Ordinary Light the feel of a classic

Tracy K. Smith (Author), Tracy K. Smith (Narrator)

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