With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation. Life on Mars begins with a series of poems in section one that focus on visions of the future and meditations on outer space and the universe. 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. 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. 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. You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself Smith, whose “lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K.
* A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice *
Prescribed Text for HSC 2019-2023 – English Extension 1 Elective 3: Reimagined worlds
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