To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet- a stunning meditation on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might-together-come to a new view of our shared past. "A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting." -Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the "din of human division and strife." With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking-personal, documentary, and spiritual-to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new terminology of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, and the distance between Time Ago and Soon, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment and offers a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other and to the future.

Reviews

Tracy K. Smith is one of the most beautiful and profound writers of our time. I wept and laughed my way through these gorgeous pages. She teaches us how our beloved ancestors remain our protectors and guides, and howin Black lifepast and present merge in the persistence of injustice and the resilience of our ancestral legacies.Imani Perry, author of South to America

A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils. Tracy K. Smith has also written a book for her children and for us. Hopeful, despite all that she sees and feels so deeply, that the freed will soon be truly free. Beautiful and haunting all at once.Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again

A unique intelligence guides the hand of Tracy K. Smith through the archives. It is an intelligence that is both fierce and composed; both compassionate and unflinching. And if intelligence is a kind of light, this light is the kind that allows alchemy. Under its radiance, the violence of the archive becomes one of the most powerful meditations on history, time, and the thread of ancestry that I have read.Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

Smith faces the animal of American history armed with love, metaphor, and enormous courage, and the results are wondrous. . . . A seminal work of American literature.Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds

Tracy K. Smiths most vulnerable and powerful book to date. . . . Every word is freighted with the gravity of grief and the sublime light of hope; every sentence sings.Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

A profound, private, meticulous excavation of the inexplicable mysteries of Black intimacy. . . . This book is about how love can humble history, and also how the quiet inimitable force we call Black love made American history possible.Robin Coste Lewis, author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

Ours is a great nation, one standing in the need of prayer, like the old song says. But Tracy K. Smiths To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul is a jeweled revelationa good Word, a solacefor our troubled times in this troubled place. Smith urges us through an archival journey of family and love and spirit, and retains an always-persuasive hope: that this land can and will sing possibilityfor all of us.Honore Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Author Bio

TRACY K. SMITH is a librettist, translator and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.