"Tracy K. Smith is one of the most beautiful and profound writers of our time. I wept and laughed my way through these gorgeous pages. She teaches us how our beloved ancestors remain our protectors and guides, and how--in Black life--past and present merge in the persistence of injustice and the resilience of our ancestral legacies. The great human virtues: love, hope, and joy move through her narration of traveling through Mexico, Oakland, New England, New York, and multiple universities and relationships over the years, all the while sharing the revelations of her own beautiful multicultural Black life. You will love her story and understand much more about your own." --Imani Perry, author of South to America "In one sense, To Free the Captives is a grief-stricken lamentation for the dead. A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils.
Tracy K. Smith has also written a book for her children and for us. Hopeful, despite all that she sees and feels so deeply, that the freed will soon be truly free. Beautiful and haunting all at once. What a gift!" --Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again "A unique intelligence guides the hand of Tracy K. Smith through the archives.
It is an intelligence that is both fierce and composed; both compassionate and unflinching. And if intelligence is a kind of light, this light is the kind that allows alchemy. Under its radiance, the violence of the archive becomes one of the most powerful meditations on history, time, and the thread of ancestry that I have read." -- Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive "In To Free the Captives, Tracy K. Smith faces the animal of American history armed with love, metaphor, and enormous courage, and the results are wondrous. In writing the experience of being Black in America--and therefore being most intensely--she thinks her feelings and feels her thoughts. There is no dissociation of sensibilities here, and clarity of poetry and the poetry of clarity mark every sentence and page in this book. The reigning feeling/thought in Smith''s writing is love, reminding me of what Hannah Arendt once wrote: ''Love is the weight of the soul.
'' To Free the Captives is a revelation, a seminal work of American literature." --Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds " To Free the Captives is Tracy K. Smith''s most vulnerable and powerful book to date. Smith reflects on young adulthood to motherhood with unparalleled lyricism, hard-won wisdom, and a bracing honesty that pierces my soul. Her memoir is both an ode and elegy to her family as well as a sobering reckoning of a country that murders Black lives with impunity. Every word is freighted with the gravity of grief and the sublime light of hope; every sentence sings. This important and revelatory memoir will inspire us all." --Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings "Tabery''s fascinating and unique book is a much-needed critique of our current obsession with genetics, personalization, and individualism in health.
A compelling mix of history of science, political intrigue, and public health policy, the book tells us how we got here - and, more importantly, why this is the wrong place to be. A must read for anyone interested in the massive disconnect between what we invest in to make us healthy and what actually matters." --Tim Caulfield, author of Relax Dammit!: A User''s Guide to the Age of Anxiety "A profound, private, yet meticulous excavation of the inexplicable mysteries of Black intimacy. Smith is a master at revealing that fine shimmering line between imagination and memory. To Free the Captives is such a book. It is a revelation of interiority, pulsating with astute, attentive, seriousness. ''Is love an institution?'' Smith asks in these pages. Was generations of black love, above all else, that propulsive force behind our survival and thriving? This book is an excavation where love hides within history--or better put, this books examines how the quiet inimitable force we call ''Black love'' made American history possible.
Word by word, Smith sparks the ground with her blade, then allows us to follow her below into the sacred world of the unspoken. But this isn''t a book about hidden secrets. Instead, it''s a shimmering articulation of all the resplendent rich silences American history has yet to learn how to articulate. And what''s truly remarkable is that--somehow--Smith has discovered a way to use language to speak resplendently about human struggle and tenacity, for which most of us have no words. Most of all this book is about how love can humble history. Love--dark, strong, ornate, and made of iron. Something that can last for lifetimes. And does.
" --Robin Coste Lewis, author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness.