In “Life on Mars,” the title poem of the volume, we find ourselves in Abu Ghraib. However, star dust and weightlessness turn to lead and we fall faster, further, landing in the midst of hate, and torture. In “Sci-Fi” she imagines a utopia where we are all “scrutable and safe.” We follow her, blissfully imagining another place where we are better, where we are more poetic. The volume’s power, however, lies in the distance between the categories she sets up.

What makes us human? What kinds of connections exist between us and the world around us?

At the core of the poems is the same raw questioning of humanity. Her poems question space and time and the benevolence of the universe in a way I remember from childhood favorites like A Wrinkle in Time. The volume opens, “Is God being or pure force? The wind/ Or what commands it?…After all we’re certain to lose, so alive-/ faces radiant with panic.” Life on Mars, made me remember what drew me to fantasy and science fiction as a child. The volume weaves together meditations on the ethereal and unknowable-God, dark matter, the expansion of the universe-with lines from David Bowie songs (this is where Smith gets her title). Her message is urgent and the poems suggested impatience with those that wait to speak up or out, and so I followed the sense of urgency and began to write. Smith, like Lux and Wrigley, is another poet on the schedule for the Vanderbilt visiting writer’s series, and I planned to write about her volume the week she gives her talk on campus however, the poems left me breathless and slightly panicked.

It left me dazed, star struck, floating in the ether. To write about Tracy Smith’s new volume Life on Mars, I cannot help but be drawn to language about space and space travel: It takes you to a galaxy, far, far away.

Life on mars poetry