Rereading the poem across time

In this episode, novelist Lisa Ko reads “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” by Tracy K. Smith. Ko’s first book, The Leavers, was a 2017 National Book Award finalist. Her most recent book, Memory Piece (Riverhead Books, 2024) was described in Electric Literature as “a poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified, and what it means to find purpose.” 

Tracy K. Smith is an American poet born in 1972. “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” was first collected in Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem is also included in Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021).

Keep up with Lisa Ko at lisa-ko.com.

We feature one short listener poem at the end of every episode. To submit, call the Haiku Hotline at 612-440-0643 and read your poem after the beep. For the occasional prompt, follow us on Facebook.

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