Life on Mars: Poems [Paperback]

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize

* Poet Laureate of the United States *
* ANew York TimesNotable Book of 2011 andNew York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice *
* ANew Yorker, Library JournalandPublishers WeeklyBest Book of the Year *

New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?
from No Fly Zone


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

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

InLife on Mars, Smith shows herself to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition. It's not easy to be so convincing in both the gl³|