Such Color

Now in paperback from Tracy K. Smith, the former poet laureate of the United States.

Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the immense mysteries and conundrums of human existence. Each of Smith's four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time, delving into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting.

Such Color collects the best poems from Smith's award-winning books and culminates in brilliant and excoriating new poems. These new works confront America's historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred-urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. Now in paperback, this magnificent retrospective affirms Smith's place as one of the twenty-first century's most treasured poets.