RaveTorShe doesn’t try to reconcile the messes in our heads. In Life on Mars she celebrates our confusing, question-riddled relationship with the universe ... We’re pulled between poems of dark, distant futures and the retro-futuristic worlds of previous generations. And as we accumulate a broader picture of space, Smith turns inward and become increasingly intimate. Other poems focus on her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. In her grief she finds herself riddled with yet more questions about the state of that that is absent ... From the cosmos to the personal, Tracy Smith reminds us of the presence of absent forces. Space is not empty, but rather a host of our projections and ungraspable things.
