With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation. Smiths third book of poetry, Life on Mars, which was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, is full of stars, but her voice is calm, unassuming, gentle. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like love and illness now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. The futuristic poems in that collection invoke a mixture of sorrow and delight as they consider humans’ place in the universe, grieve her father’s death in 2008, comment on contemporary headlines, and voice the everyday frustrations of having noisy neighbours. 65 million years ago, a very large, fast-moving body impacted Earth, creating Chixulub crater and kicking up enough. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Life on Mars. With the Perseverance rover set to land on Mars on February 18, 2021, we are finally in a position to know where to go, what to look for, and knowing whether there is, or ever was, life on the Red Planet. 4.) Mars didn’t have life until Earth seeded it, naturally.

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself But in order to finally get the answer, we have to know what to look for and where to go on the planet to look for evidence of past life.

Pulitzer life on mars