To Free the Captives

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: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul searching and searching the historical archive to grapple with the terms of freedom, worth and regard with which we live. Lyrically, and with urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, historical, and spiritual—to understand who we are and what we might hope to mean to one another.

To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new vocabulary of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, and the distance between Time Ago and Soon, she etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Pulling from her own, intimate losses, Smith draws us away from the broken comfort of easy certainties, and past the roadblocks of conventional logic, to make a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to one another and the future.