I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Clark bridges a Tennessee landscape’s past and present in her stellar debut, evincing a potent mix of history, injury, and divided identity. The opening poem, “Nashville,” sets the tone, with a racist epithet hurled in a city gentrified by people who “don’t know about the history of Jefferson Street or Hell’s/ Half Acre.” Clark investigates mixed black heritage and marriage to a white partner whose family asks “Can’t we// just let the past be the past?” Her speakers boldly face moments of tension that often draw blood; in such terrain, even a youngster’s first kiss is fraught with hazard: “My braces cut you—/ metallic scythe.” These speakers are in dialogue with an array of personalities as psychological as they are historical, including Phillis Wheatley, Nina Simone, and Hannah Peace from Toni Morrison’s Sula. Yet these formally adventurous lyric poems are equally alert to nature’s violence, whether depicting the sprint of skittish livestock or the aftermath of volcanic eruption (“insidious gas or the searing belch of reckless lava”). In their forthright tone and layered sense of regional heritage, Clark’s lines locate and evoke a nexus of dark erotic knowledge “full of thunderstorm/ and terracotta, baked earth and spangled with Tennessee pollen.”

September 15, 2018

"For me, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung." Thus does Clark explain the title of her Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winner, which viscerally imparts the trauma visited on the African American body--and therefore the African American soul. "I carry so many black souls/ in my skin," she says in one poem prompted by her white mother-in-law's wish for the family to be photographed at Carnton Plantation. The plea, "Can't we just let/ the past by the past?" is resoundingly answered throughout in the negative. In the unsettling and ambitious "Cottonmouth," the snake's gaping mouth evokes both being swallowed and the dilating vagina, with the speaker finally "[giving] birth to myself." Yet the struggle to claim herself against physical and psychic violence continues, as she hears the incessant echo of racial epithet and, in the affecting "Tim," identifies with a terrified baby goat. VERDICT An honest, punch-angry portrait of being American while black.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2018
In this blistering, multivalent debut poetry collection, Clark delivers a relentlessly creative examination of black experiences, especially as lived by folks in the South, where the author attended graduate school, and where the myth of a post-racial America thrives due to "the antebellum base, the bedrock of Southern amnesia." Employing an abundantly wide range of poetic forms, Clark combines pithy lines, running sentences, odd indentations, and intentional use of white space, often within the same poem. Her speakers describe keloids ( Cain-cursed with magical crust, armored melatonin ), and the skin of the only survivor of the Mount Pel�e eruption ( a blistered onyx back, cracked coal, black tephra ), and Clark confronts discomfort with brutal honesty. Of her white husband, a speaker admits: I'm attracted to things / that once owned me. Elsewhere, unexpected combinations generate beautiful imagery: the forgotten phonics of blood, the bluing drag of dawn, a cluster of fluffy chromosomes. The list goes on. It's in this boundless imagination and versatility that Clark earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)