To Free the Captives (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Tracy K Smith | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a stunning meditation on ritual and collectiveness that explores how older forms of inquiry--from song to prayer to ways of public gathering--might help us all survive violent times and address America's shared history.

"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: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith wondered if a sense of collective enterprise could return to American life. Meditating and praying, writing and remembering, she communed with ancestors and her family's past. In doing so, she began to wonder if these forms of ritual were in fact exactly what was missing from how America addressed race and itself. In this tender and profoundly urgent book, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking--personal, historical, and spiritual--to create a radically uplifting work about how such practices could inform our individual lives, as well as that of the nation.

To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new vocabulary of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, of the near and the soon--soon as defined in black spirituals--she etches a clear description of where we are at this point, four hundred years into the American experiment. Pulling from her own, recent intimate losses, Smith draws us away from the broken comfort of easy certainties to the lip of what is logical and makes a compelling argument for the importance of faith--of spiritual language and practice--in confronting America's past.

To Free the Captives invites the reader to a gathering of spirits, as Smith defines it. Calling upon her elders, from the poet Lucille Clifton to the wisdom of her late father, she forms a clear-eyed vision of American life and of Black life born of elegy and pride, an idea of a nation in which decency is possible so long as we admit truly what we are and have been. In the context of deep polarization and continued violence, this is a strikingly hopeful book, vulnerable, clear-eyed about the work that remains to be done, yet determined to see what is yet possible when the spirit is called forth.