Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Grace Engine

Grace Engine

Burton, Joshua

Paperback

Series: Wisconsin Poetry

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 029934164X
ISBN13: 9780299341640
Publisher: Univ Of Wisconsin Pr
Published: Mar 21 2023
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.77 Depth: 8.82
Language: English
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.

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