# Wade in the Water

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/tracy-k-smith/wade-in-the-water/9780141987859

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![Wade in the Water](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/tracy-k-smith/wade-in-the-water_978-01-4198-785-9.jpg?v=2026-04-24%2006%3A20%3A03)

- Book: [Wade in the Water](https://www.bookquiver.com/tracy-k-smith/wade-in-the-water) ([Wade in the Water.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/tracy-k-smith/wade-in-the-water.md))
- Authors: [Tracy K. Smith](https://www.bookquiver.com/tracy-k-smith)
- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-01-4198-785-9
- Published: 2018-04-03
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

In Wade in the Water , Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to the 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 The Declaration of Independence 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. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.