I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood

I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the BloodWinner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize For prize winning poet Tiana Clark, 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 she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing

Winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
For prize-winning poet Tiana Clark, 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 she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves 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, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can't Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because Tiana cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past--she will always see blood on the leaves.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 09/18/2018
ISBN: 9780822965589
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.30h x 6.60w x 0.70d

Review Citations: Library Journal 09/15/2018 pg. 56
Booklist 09/15/2018 pg. 14
Publishers Weekly 10/01/2018