“Everything Disappears as if Returning Somewhere?” Cosmic Dreaming, Fragilised Worlds, and Tracy K. Smith’s „Life on Mars”
“Everything Disappears as if Returning Somewhere?” Cosmic Dreaming, Fragilised Worlds, and Tracy K. Smith’s „Life on Mars”

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to analyse how Tracy K. Smith’s award-winning collection of poems, Life on Mars, negotiates the material and conceptual boundaries of loss in relationship to the issues of finitude, memory, and survival. Referring to Karen Barad, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Bataille among other critics, the text analyses how Smith uses earthly and sidereal perspectives, metaphorically unpacking one in the other to challenge the regimes of presence/absence, life/death, known/unknown, or future/past. The first part of the article largely is dedicated to the poetic and philosophical encounters of the personal loss, anxieties over the future, and the complexity of materiality. In the other part, a more ethically-engaged reading of a single poem, “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected,” is presented, which discusses loss as a paradoxical form of agency.

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