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Tracy K. Smith is the author of four collections of poetry, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  She is also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.  Smith served as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States.  She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New Jersey.

My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree 2021 Shortlist

Graywolf Press, USA

Judges’ Citation

One of shortest poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree creates — in just five lines! — lasting theological perspective: ‘When life ends, / Memory endures.

One of shortest poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree creates — in just five lines! — lasting theological perspective: ‘When life ends, / Memory endures. / When memory ends, / What persists /Attests to the spirit.’ Such larger-than-life–and yet also such delicate–approach distinguishes this  collection as it gathers poems of eros and grief, each page bursting with attentiveness to our world. ‘Each blade of grass is a glorious eye,’ Yi Lei writes, echoing, and also revising, Whitman. In very beautiful versions by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi, Yi Lei’s voice here becomes invigorating, lasting poetry in English.


See also