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Above Ground

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What to expect

A New York Times bestselling poetry collection from Clint Smith, author of #1 bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner How the Word Is Passed. 

"A joyful embrace and legacy of bright language and poignant questions." —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

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.

A Best Book of the Year 2023: TIME • NPR’s Best Books • New York Public Library • Electric Lit • The Root • NBC Today • Mother Jones

Critics Review

“I’m so grateful that Clint Smith’s poems remind us of our interdependence on each other—on chrysanthemums, jellyfish, plankton, to note just a few of his magnificent poetic negotiations—all while turning his wide and generous eyes to fatherhood. This book is an illumination I sorely needed of both the outdoors and the quotidian—a joyful embrace and legacy of bright language and poignant questions.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders
 “Clint Smith’s poems make palpable the soap-bubble thinness of borders—the contingent boundaries of love and loss, past and present, sanctuary and violence, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ With inextinguishable generosity and abundant wisdom, he shows us the linkages that both bind and divide us—as family, as community, as nation, as world: ‘The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.’ I am so grateful for these luminous poems.
 —Monica Youn, author of Blackacre
“I think there is an emergent theory, and maybe also a demand, when Clint Smith considers the brutalizing facts and language of war almost alongside a reverie about sprinkling sand on his baby’s feet; when he mourns the long and brutal and ongoing history of American slavery almost alongside making French toast with the kids or dancing until the whole family falls down.  When he makes us witness the most incomprehensibly awful (and daily) brutalities not only beside but almost in tandem with the most incomprehensibly tender (and daily) actions of care.  It’s a theory, and a demand, to which I think we must pay very close attention.”—Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy
Author Clint Smith
Narrator Clint Smith
Duration 1 hours and 30 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781549133282
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Ethnic studies, Poetry, Sociology: family and relationships
Availability US

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