I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood

Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6558-9
Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press

Buch, Englisch, 80 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 169 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 218 g

Reihe: Pitt Poetry Series

Winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

For me, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that I cannot escape, but one that I have learned to lean into as I delve into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, my own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can't Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because I cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—I will always see blood on the leaves.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clark, Tiana

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Über Autor(innen)

Tiana Clark is the author of Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize, and winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2015, BOAAT, Crab Orchard Review, Thrush, The Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.