From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a "startlingly original debut" (Maggie Millner) that meanders toward possibilities of arboreal relief among entanglements of place, property, and urban planning in Charlottesville, Virginia
Shade is a place meanders east–west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking “a Black sense of place” at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural history, and the speaker’s ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one’s attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems (“tree walks” and “shade walks”) and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one’s inner life—sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.
Advance Praise for Shade is a place:
“Shade is a place consciously extends the American tradition of documentary poetics, plaited here with a Black feminist, ecopoetic vision distinctly Tolbert’s own. ‘Tell the trees I’m sorry / for taking so long to see them,’ she writes, casting us in the brilliant shade of her devotion to the world, and illumining even its darkest reaches with loving regard. This is simply an extraordinary book.” —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a "startlingly original debut" (Maggie Millner) that meanders toward possibilities of arboreal relief among entanglements of place, property, and urban planning in Charlottesville, Virginia
Shade is a place meanders east–west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking “a Black sense of place” at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural history, and the speaker’s ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one’s attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems (“tree walks” and “shade walks”) and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one’s inner life—sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.
Praise
Advance Praise for Shade is a place:
“Shade is a place consciously extends the American tradition of documentary poetics, plaited here with a Black feminist, ecopoetic vision distinctly Tolbert’s own. ‘Tell the trees I’m sorry / for taking so long to see them,’ she writes, casting us in the brilliant shade of her devotion to the world, and illumining even its darkest reaches with loving regard. This is simply an extraordinary book.” —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
