Description
A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR **x2022; The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice **x2022; A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might**x2014;together**x2014;come to a new view of our shared past “A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils…Hopeful…Beautiful and haunting.” **x2014;Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking**x2014;personal, documentary, and spiritual**x2014;to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith’s father’s family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero’s record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life. Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?
About the Author
TRACY K. SMITH is a librettist, a translator, and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.
