Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith isn’t the kind of versifier who aims for small targets.

As Smith told Oprah Daily, her work can generally be broken down into attempts to answer a few basic yet crucial questions:

“Who are we to one another?”
“What do we do to one another?”
“What’s the fallout from that?”

Start out interrogating any or all of those ideas and you will never run out of material.