Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith's four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith's signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even-and especially-in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.
Such Color collects the best poems from Smith's award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America's historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred-urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith's place as one of the twenty-first century's most treasured poets.
"[Tracy K. Smith is] a poet of formal breadth and consistent excellence. . . . This collection is a commanding reminder that the former poet laureate is one of the most important poets writing today."
Emilia Phillips, The New York Times Book Review
"Haunting and vital, [Such Color is] the perfect encapsulation of a remarkable body of work."
TIME
"[Such Color] solidifies Smith as one of the most talented writers in American poetry, a writer who is sure to continue crafting remarkable verse for years to come."