Life on Mars

Life on Mars is a poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The collection is an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Publication Smith published the 88-page collection with Graywolf Press in 2011. Content 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. Her father had been a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and "Smith cannot think about [him] 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." Chiasson also points to the Martian reference's callback to the culture of the 1950s. "The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. 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."