Buch, Englisch, 128 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 172 mm x 224 mm, Gewicht: 177 g
Reihe: Wisconsin Poetry Series
Buch, Englisch, 128 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 172 mm x 224 mm, Gewicht: 177 g
Reihe: Wisconsin Poetry Series
ISBN: 978-0-299-34164-0
Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press
“Words carry the dead like henchmen,” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, “I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”
Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed
themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
I
The Hearing We Inherit 7
Grace & Pity 10
Death/Machine/Ruin 12
Grace Division 13
To those who count suicide as a spiritual warfare addendum 15
Royal 16
Man in a Hole 17
Death/Machine/Ruin 20
Elegy for Threats with Grace 21
Death/Machine/Ruin 24
Bayou City Season 25
Grace & Separation 28
A Consequence (Passing) 30
Ten Stories 34
We
The Mirror Myth 37
To those who think I won’t set this country afire with me still in it 42
A Constant Conjunction 43
( )
Giving Jim Grace 47
Prophet Royal Robertson 49
Giving Mary Grace 50
To those who know how to unthreat oneself 52
The Worst Houston 53
Grace Engine 55
Giving Laura Grace 57
Grace as Kin as Sin as Skin 59
A Confession 60
As I Grace Myself into a Rephrasing Freedom 62
Notes 63
Acknowledgments 65
