Above ground Poems

A poet best known for his critically acclaimed treatise on slavery in the U.S., How the Word Is Passed (2021), Smith returns to verse with a focus on fatherhood, childhood, and race in America. Smith's poems are rich with fond nods to prenatal doctor's appointments and Dr. Seuss and exacting odes to phenomena as tiny as an infant hiccup. He celebrates the unbridled joy of an impromptu supermarket dance party, "we turn the space between Pop / Tarts and Quaker Oats into Showtime at the Apollo." He offers aphorisms that hit hard in light of the climate catastrophe: "The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away." And Smith presents a jaw-dropping concrete poem, "For Willie Francis, the First Known Person to Survive an Execution by Electric Chair, 1947," composed in devastating bisyllabic lines that take the shape of an electric chair: "Wet face. / Soft skin. / Mouth shut. / Eyes closed. / Heart beats. / Strapped tight. / Heads bend. / Flips switch. / They think. / Boy breathes."

Smith, whose How the Word Is Passed won the 2021 nonfiction National Book Critics Circle Award, returns to poetry in this, his second collection (after Counting Descent). His focus here is on Black fatherhood and the immense responsibility that parenting entails ("When I speak to my son I carry/ the echo of generations") when the "moral arc of the universe/ does not bend in a direction that comforts us." As he watches his young children grow--fragile blossoms of wonder and beauty amid the world's chaos and violence--he wonders how he can protect them, writing: "I am trying to inhale all the smoke/ from this burning world while/ asking you to hold your breath." In candid lyric poems often written in direct address to his son and daughter, Smith exquisitely captures the anxiety, love, uncertainty, and joy that accompany the challenge of nurturing nascent human lives, all the while casting a nervous eye on the unstable natural, social, and political environments they'll inherit. VERDICT While this collection will resonate most deeply with parents, its wisdom, humanity, and sheer eloquence speak to a time and condition all readers will recognize.--Fred Muratori