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A Best Book of the Year 2023:
TIME
NPR’s Best Books
New York Public Library
Electric Lit
The Root
NBC Today
Mother Jones
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.
330 Reviews
4.5
Mel
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Katherine Smith
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“Smith cleverly pairs his joy and grief, birth and death, past and future in this beautiful collection. Wonderful use of language, punctuation, and structure. I laughed out loud and cried. I sent poems to my friend who just gave birth. I will be thinking about some of these poems for months to come.”Saskia Daru
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Anna :)
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“5 stars for my enjoyment and the daily 15 minutes of reading poetry that Regulated my Nervous System™️. I really love and respect Clint Smith and so enjoyed his reflections on parenthood in this volume— I want to recommend it to my parent friends, but specifically my dad friends.
One of my favorite excerpts from the titular poem, “Above Ground,” which is about Smith teaching his kids about the cicadas:
“you both try to pick up cicadas from the ground/ and collect them in buckets as if they are treasure. / And maybe they are.
Maybe treasure is in what dies almost/ as quickly as it rises from the earth. / Maybe treasure is anything that reminds you / what a miracle it is to be alive.””
reagan
Created 20 days agoShare
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“Love love love Clint Smith and his ability to unflinchingly bring up hard realities of our broken world in his art. I will read any collection he releases.”About Clint Smith
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review. and elsewhere. Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.
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