Tracy K. Smith

In this brilliant collection of 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 kitschy concepts like 'love' and 'illness', now relegated to the museum of obsolescence. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe, accompanying the discoveries, failures and oddities of human existence and establishing Smith as one of the best poets of her generation.

Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for best first book by an African-American poet, this compelling collection of poems gathers together stories from the intersection of race, family, adulthood, and childhood in search of herself, concluding that "I was anyone I wanted to be." Original.