Reading Smith, one is suddenly aware of “man” not only as a gender but as a weight—a solid force that risks ending the poem for a moment. But the moment passes as Smith, no longer the girl carried off by Luis, does the taking. But what is it that she has taken? What needs to be rooted out? That all-consuming, lunatic desire that ages us even as it drives us wild?

In “Duende” and in her third book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Life on Mars” (2011), Smith explores another aspect of her “I”—Tracy before she was Tracy. In “Interrogative,” she writes of her pregnant mother: “What did your hand mean to smooth / Across the casket of your belly? / What echoed there, if not me—tiny body / Afloat, akimbo, awake, or at rest?” To imagine who you were before you were is a way of understanding who you are now and what you may become. Smith is interested in the roots of love, the various selves that go into the making of a body. But “Duende” isn’t all wish and wonder. It’s also about threats to the female body, pleasures that can be withdrawn, judged. In her extraordinary poem “The Searchers,” she writes about a character in John Ford’s 1956 film of the same title—a white girl who was kidnapped and brought up by Native Americans. Saved, in a manner of speaking, by John Wayne, the child is returned to the white world she has never known:

He wants to kill her for surviving,

For the language she spits,

The way she runs, clutching

Her skirt as if life pools there. Instead he grabs her, puts her

On his saddle, rides back

Into town where faces

She barely remembers Smile into her fear

With questions and the wish,

The impossible wish, to forget.

What does living do to any of us?

Again and again, the questions arise: What does it mean for a man to take a girl or a woman? And what can it do to a man’s idea of a woman if she is free and takes him? Is a relationship a kind of abduction or a form of rescue? Are men agents of freedom or of oppression? Are relationships a metaphor for life or life itself?

Part of the gorgeous struggle in Smith’s poetry is about how to understand and accept her twin selves: the black girl who was brought up to be a polite Christian and the woman who is willing to give herself over to unbridled sensation and desire, even with guys of other races.

Born in 1972, Smith was the youngest of five siblings. Her parents, Floyd and Kathryn, an engineer and a schoolteacher, respectively, were Alabama natives who came up, politically speaking, during the civil-rights era. Smith was born in Massachusetts, but the family soon moved to Fairfield, California, where Floyd was stationed at a military base. Smith was a relatively privileged child; some of her siblings were already away at college when she was learning to read and write, so she had her parents more or less to herself. Words were a bond between the couple and their child. In her remarkable memoir, “Ordinary Light” (2015), Smith describes the bookshelves that her father had built in the hallway leading to her parents’ bedroom. There she found “the books my father would forever push me to read: ‘Kidnapped,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ ‘Ivanhoe,’ and the ones I eventually came to discover on my own. . . . There were some of [my mother’s] books on the shelves, I’m sure of it, books on child-rearing and theology, but the majority of what sat there spoke to my father’s sense of the world—or the world as he’d like us to know it: a vast and varied place full of mystery and order.”

For Kathryn Smith, mystery and order were ecclesiastical; the world began and ended with His word. It wasn’t that she was fierce in her belief so much as that she was calmly, resolutely resigned to the power of faith. Floyd was happily resigned to the power of science and earthly life. (At one point, he set up an incubator in the house, so that Tracy could see how birds were hatched.)

If there is a central underlying tension in “Ordinary Light,” it’s the division between Smith’s reflective, mother-identified self—the one who, at age three, told her mother that she wanted to open her heart to the Lord—and the energy that goes into actively living one’s life, as exemplified by her father. Should Smith be independent, like a boy, or was it her portion, as a girl, to wait for Jesus to take the wheel? Were girls like her meant to be the upholders of community—Christian community—while boys were free to be individual thinkers? And where was Jesus when, for instance, a girl Tracy knew asked her if she wished she were white? Smith writes: