Staff Picks: Interwar, War, and Postwar

Tracy K Smith

“Our bodies run with ink dark blood. / Blood pools in the pavement’s seams. Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” So begins Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Unrest in Baton Rouge,” from the forthcoming collection, . Like many of the poems in this slim yet searing book, “Unrest” is at once a haunting testimonial of the foulness on which the country was built and an homage to the love—however scant it may at times feel—that’s persevered despite it all. From start to finish, the collection traverses American history, comprising imagined letters between slaveholders, between black men or women and “Mr abarham lincon” or “My Children” or “Excellent Sir”; erasures, using the Declaration of Independence as source material; and poems about “our magnificent roads, / Our bridges slung with steel, / Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights … ” But Smith writes, too, of more personal moments—the wonders of motherhood, the terrors of womanhood—so that, she most certainly is.