Reviewing the collection for The New York Times, Joel Brouwer said Life on Mars shows Smith 'to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition.and the early successes of this collection far outweigh its later missteps. Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted: we can’t think about one set of fifties images, of Martians and sci-fi comics, without conjuring another, of black kids in the segregated South.' Reception 'The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. Her father had been a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and 'Smith cannot think about without thinking in galactic dimensions, which, paradoxically, minimize him: drawn to that scale, individual lives (even his) can seem puny, and private traumas (even hers) inconsequential.' Ĭhiasson also points to the Martian reference's callback to the culture of the 1950s. Writing in The Washington Post, Troy Jollimore advised readers 'had better be prepared to face some stark metaphysical questions.An awareness of death permeates Life on Mars.' In The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson described Life on Mars as 'Smith’s wild, far-ranging elegy' for her father who died in 2008. Smith published the 88-page collection with Graywolf Press in 2011. The collection is an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Smith for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

Life on Mars is a poetry collection by Tracy K.

Life on mars by smith