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.