Life on Mars

Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, which looks at human life against the vast scale of the universe. Smith draws on the death of her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, alongside science fiction, space travel, politics, and pop culture to explore mortality and the scale of human existence.

The poems contrast the infinite cosmos with the vulnerability of human life, asking what becomes of love, loss, and suffering when viewed from such a distance.

Tracy K. Smith won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Life on Mars and served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Harvard, and is the guest of Conversations ep. 7.