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Life On Mars

Audiobook
Fiction: Poetry
Unabridged   1.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 09/12/2017

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of 2011
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Life On Mars

Poems

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781681688978
Digital Download ISBN:9781681688985

Summary

With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence.

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Product Description

In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

Reviews/Praise

"She fills the space with purposeful pauses and slow, steady monotones that blend the metaphorical and the actual." —AudioFile

"Laughlin Award–winner Smith's third collection blends pop culture, history, elegy, anecdote, and sociopolitical commentary to illustrate the weirdness of contemporary living." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“Hypnotic and brimming with irony, the poems in Smith's latest volume aren't so much about outer space as the interior life and the search for the divine. . . . The spiritual motif running through these poems adds a stunning dimension that will please many readers.” ―Library Journal

"As all the best poetry does, Life on Mars first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled." ―New York Times Book Review

“[The poems] are smart, funny, and expertly crafted.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Author Bio

Tracy K. Smith is the author of two previous poetry collections: Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award, and The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.