Grace Engine
“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.
 
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”
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Grace Engine
“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.
 
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”
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Grace Engine

Grace Engine

by Joshua Burton
Grace Engine

Grace Engine

by Joshua Burton

Overview

“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.
 
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780299341640
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date: 03/21/2023
Series: Wisconsin Poetry Series
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 128
Sales rank: 1,038,675
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, Texas, and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and was a 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, and more.

Table of Contents

I
The Hearing We Inherit 7
Grace & Pity 10
Death/Machine/Ruin 12
Grace Division 13
To those who count suicide as a spiritual warfare addendum 15
Royal 16
Man in a Hole 17
Death/Machine/Ruin 20
Elegy for Threats with Grace 21
Death/Machine/Ruin 24
Bayou City Season 25
Grace & Separation 28
A Consequence (Passing) 30
Ten Stories 34

We
The Mirror Myth 37
To those who think I won’t set this country afire with me still in it 42
A Constant Conjunction 43
( )
Giving Jim Grace 47
Prophet Royal Robertson 49
Giving Mary Grace 50
To those who know how to unthreat oneself 52
The Worst Houston 53
Grace Engine 55
Giving Laura Grace 57
Grace as Kin as Sin as Skin 59
A Confession 60
As I Grace Myself into a Rephrasing Freedom 62

Notes 63
Acknowledgments 65
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