{"product_id":"9781555978136","title":"Wade in the Water: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEven the men in black armor, the ones\u003cbr\u003eJangling handcuffs and keys, what else\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAre they so buffered against, if not love’s blade\u003cbr\u003eSizing up the heart’s familiar meat?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.\u003cbr\u003eLove: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLove: naked almost in the everlasting street,\u003cbr\u003eSkirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e—from “Unrest in Baton Rouge”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eWade in the Water\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Declaration of Independence\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eWade in the Water\u003c\/i\u003e is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Graywolf Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47030650175728,"sku":"9781555978136","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781555978136_p0.jpg?v=1763754538","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781555978136","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}