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Title details for Above Ground by Clint Smith - Wait list

Above Ground

by Clint Smith
Clint Smith
Audiobook
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A remarkable poetry collection from Clint Smith, the #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Critics Circle award-winning author of How the Word Is Passed.
Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.
Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith's first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 28, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781549133282
      • File size: 43368 KB
      • Duration: 01:30:20

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      March 1, 2023
      A poet best known for his critically acclaimed treatise on slavery in the U.S., How the Word Is Passed (2021), Smith returns to verse with a focus on fatherhood, childhood, and race in America. Smith's poems are rich with fond nods to prenatal doctor's appointments and Dr. Seuss and exacting odes to phenomena as tiny as an infant hiccup. He celebrates the unbridled joy of an impromptu supermarket dance party, ""we turn the space between Pop / Tarts and Quaker Oats into Showtime at the Apollo."" He offers aphorisms that hit hard in light of the climate catastrophe: ""The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away."" And Smith presents a jaw-dropping concrete poem, ""For Willie Francis, the First Known Person to Survive an Execution by Electric Chair, 1947,"" composed in devastating bisyllabic lines that take the shape of an electric chair: ""Wet face. / Soft skin. / Mouth shut. / Eyes closed. / Heart beats. / Strapped tight. / Heads bend. / Flips switch. / They think. / Boy breathes.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from April 1, 2023

      Smith, whose How the Word Is Passed won the 2021 nonfiction National Book Critics Circle Award, returns to poetry in this, his second collection (after Counting Descent). His focus here is on Black fatherhood and the immense responsibility that parenting entails ("When I speak to my son I carry/ the echo of generations") when the "moral arc of the universe/ does not bend in a direction that comforts us." As he watches his young children grow--fragile blossoms of wonder and beauty amid the world's chaos and violence--he wonders how he can protect them, writing: "I am trying to inhale all the smoke/ from this burning world while/ asking you to hold your breath." In candid lyric poems often written in direct address to his son and daughter, Smith exquisitely captures the anxiety, love, uncertainty, and joy that accompany the challenge of nurturing nascent human lives, all the while casting a nervous eye on the unstable natural, social, and political environments they'll inherit. VERDICT While this collection will resonate most deeply with parents, its wisdom, humanity, and sheer eloquence speak to a time and condition all readers will recognize.--Fred Muratori

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Clint Smith's poems are deep, resonant, and well crafted. He delivers them with a clear understanding of their meaning and how to bring that meaning to listeners. His works explore various aspects of fatherhood from experiencing the early stages of a first pregnancy to managing two toddlers. Some of the experiences Smith chronicles are specific to Black families, but many are not, and most of the audiobook will resonate with parents of all backgrounds. Smith's tone is confiding and welcoming. Parenthood is not an event but a process, and this collection gives listeners a vivid picture of the beginning of that story. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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Check out what's being checked out right now Content of this digital collection is funded by your local Minuteman library, supplemented by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.