To Free the Captives A Plea for the American Soul

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 digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new terminology of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, and the distance between Time Ago and Soon, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment and offers a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other and to the future.

TRACY K. SMITH is a professor at Harvard University and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and a memoir Ordinary Life, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She lives in Massachusetts.