The Body's Question: Poems - Softcover

Smith, Tracy K.; Young, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555973914 ISBN 13: 9781555973919

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2003

Synopsis

The debut collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States

* Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize *

You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
--from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"

The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

About this title

About the Author:

Tracy K. Smith received degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York.

Review:

“How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith's debut collection. Smith's work is deceptively plain-spoken, but these are poems that are powerfully wrought, inspiring in all the clarity of their many gospel truths. The Body's Question announces a remarkable new voice, brilliantly bundled, ingeniously belted down.” ―Lucie Brock-Broido

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1555973914
• ISBN 13: 9781555973919
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72