In my junior year of high school, in an English class focusing on the formation of senses of place in the natural world, I read Tracy K. Smith’s poem anthology, Life on Mars, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The title is inspired by the David Bowie song of the same name, stylized as Life on Mars? The song itself paints a surreal picture of violence, confusion, injustice, and an ongoing battle between entertainment and ennui as the “girl with the mousy hair” watches a performance toeing the line between metaphor and reality.

The anthology serves as an elegy to Smith’s late father, a fan of David Bowie, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Life on Mars serves as an homage to her father’s work as she processes the pain, confusion, and yearning of grief.  The work may be called at once transcendentalist and Afrofuturist as Smith finds paternal comfort in the vastness and potentiality of outer space. An excerpt from the poem “The Speed of Belief” reads “I didn’t want to believe/What we believe in those rooms: That we are blessed, letting go, Letting someone, anyone;/Drag open the drapes and heave us/Back into our blinding, bright lives.” In those unbelievable moments of suffocating, claustrophobic pain, the space left by her father can be used to separate her from a world that is trying to manufacture her healing.

Some poems from the anthology are easier to understand than others certainly, but if you like poetry I think that you will love this read. It is an adept fusion of poetic styles and symbolism, offering a space for healing in the potentiality of the cosmos. While drawing on the fascination that has inspired science fiction writers for the past century, her Afrofuturist lens creates an outer space that is not a frontier to be conquered and explored, but a mystic realm to which we can retreat to process and find meaning and inspiration through loss.

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