Life on Mars is both hypothetical and alive. It is an exploration of the universe experiencing itself through us. From pop culture references like David Bowie to topics as vast and intangible as a future far from Earth long after its sad and humble obsolescence. In her poem, “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” Smith shows us what it’s like to be stardust, to be a brilliant fleck floating through “the never-ending night of space” when she writes:

This message going out to all of space. . . . Though
Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

And later, from the same poem:
Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.

This book is at once cool and dispassionate yet it aches for our own vulnerability in a time and place never to be repeated, the impossible beauty of life on Earth, or life on Mars. We feel neither alone nor afraid. It feels okay. It feels better than okay. This collection makes the reader feel somehow limitless and eternal and yet like we’re already gone. The reader feels like a ghost of humanity looking backward as if on a memory of Earth electrified in its own cosmic loneliness; a planet ignited by its own temporariness and uniqueness. Smith constructs a telescope out of her poems to show us ourselves from far away and the expanding universe also looking in, looking back—“comprehending us.” A universe that is mostly empty space, merely sprinkled with time and rocks and fire and also us. Beautiful, impossible us.

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