In Waco, April means the Beall Poetry festival at Baylor University.

Smith covers a great area perhaps unified by some notion of memory or space or loss, but this possible unity is not tangible enough to allow the collection the potential it has to be completely astounding. In looking at the collection as a whole, it seems too disjointed.

I might try to look at each section as its own collection, but each one being not even chapbook length, it feels too underdeveloped. Smith explores the concepts of literal/figurative space and outer space in interesting ways, but the overt homages to Kubrick and Bowie in the first part seem like a whole other collection when compared to social indictments of killers in part three or the meditation on a lover's hands in part four. The thematic elements and tone in each part of this book are very distinct, and that is perhaps to its detriment. Like many collections of poetry, this book is divided into parts. So many of the poems are tightly crafted and concise while being abundantly clear, and often haunting. She proves that at multiple moments in this collection. Smith knows how to write poems of emotional intensity, candor, and charm. Chapter 42: When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me.Chapter 32: The Universe as Primal Scream.Chapter 30: They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected.Chapter 20: The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.Chapter 17: Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?.Chapter 14: At Some Point, They’ll Want to Know What It Was Like.Chapter 11: The Universe Is a House Party.

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. 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. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. This collection was the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, among other awards.įocused on themes of discovery, failure, and the oddities of humanity, Smith reveals delicate beauty in this science fiction poetry collection. Smith comes the beautiful and notable collection Life On Mars. From Poet Laureate of the United States Tracy K.

Life on mars poetry collection