97 Quotes by Tracy K. Smith

Is this love the trouble you promised?

Once upon a time, a woman told this to her daughter: Save yourself. The girl didn’t think to ask for what? She looked into her mother’s face and answered Yes. Years later, alone in the room where she lives The daughter listens to the life she’s been saved from: Evening patter. Summer laughter. Young bodies Racing into the unmitigated happiness of danger.

Lizzie Harris’s debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

I shut my ears, averted my eyes, turning instead to what I thought at the time was pain’s antidote: silence. I was wrong... Silence feeds pain, allows it to fester and thrive. What starves pain, what forces it to release its grip, is speech, the voice upon which rides the story, this is what happened; this is what I have refused to let claim me.

This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.

I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I’m the youngest of five children.

These and other tools help poems call our attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes – when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.

Brooklyn is kind of my writer’s retreat.

In the ’70s, everything shone as bright as brass.