Synopses & Reviews
Every poem is the story of itself.Pure conflict. Its own undoing.
Breeze of dreams, then certain death.
--from "History"
Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.
Review
Praise for
The Body's Question:
"The most persuasively haunted poems here are those where [Smith] casts herself not simply as a dutiful curator of personal history but a canny medium of fellow feeling and the stirrings of the collective unconscious . . . [And] it's this charged air of rapt apprehension that gives her spare, fluid lines their coolly incantatory tenor as she warms to the task of channeling disquieting visions and fugitive voices." --The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
The award-winning second collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States
Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico Garcia Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.
About the Author
TRACY K. SMITH is the author of The Body's Question. She received a Whiting Writers' Award in 2005 and a 2004 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Princeton University.
Table of Contents
I.History
Flores Woman
The Searchers
SeptemberLetter to a Photojournalist Going-In
II.
El Mar AstralMinister of Saudade
I Don't Miss It
Igor at Gunpoint
Diego,
Western Fragment
After Persephone
To Burn with a Low Blue Flame
One Man at a Time
Poem in Which Nobody Says, "I Told You So"
Now That the Weather Has Turned
Duende
III.
Slow Burn
Interrogative
When Zappa Crashes My Family Reunion
Theft
"I Killed You Because You Didn't Go to School and Had No Future"
"Into the Moonless Light"
The Opposite of War
Costa Chica
In Brazil
Vaya, Camarón
Nocture, Andalusian Dog
The Nobodies
Notes
Tracy K. Smith on PowellsBooks.Blog
Every book Tracy K. Smith has published has won an award or received an honor. Her first book of poetry,
The Body's Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; her second,
Duende, won the James Laughlin Award; and her third,
Life on Mars, upped the ante and won the Pulitzer. Her memoir,
Ordinary Light, was a National Book Award finalist...
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