Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets. All good podcast episodes end with some annoying, jarring coughs (this one does, and I didnt even edit the sound out because WE DO IT RAW OVER HERE) Anyway, despite having a bit of a cold, I invited Troutface on to talk about 'Ash vs Evil Dead' and a 'Tales from the Crypt' episode called 'You, Murderer. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees.

Smith’s signature voice?inquisitive, lyrical, and wry?turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory some collage an array of documents and voices and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy.

A portion of this passage follows: Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. It is the story of the pool by the Sheep GateBethzatha in Hebrew. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. The refrain of Wade in the Water is based upon the narrative of John 5:2-9.

Wade in the water poems