I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood

by Tiana Clark

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965589
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	257,495
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Tiana Clark is the author of Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize, and winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2015, BOAAT, Crab Orchard Review, Thrush, The Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. 
 

Read an Excerpt

How to Find the Center of a Circle
 
 
x2                                                                  + y2                              = r2            
The first time                I                                   was called a nigger
with those                    red hot                         g sounds,
molten syllables            as searing lassos           around my neck
at a skating rink            they                             like white spiders          
spun around me            silking                          a carousel of hate.
I didn't know                what                             the word meant
but my body                 blackened                    wrong with heat.
Ugly                             marked                        a radius of shameful skin
as two white boys         taunted me                   on roller skates,
they curved                  the loop of                   my circumference. I was
a little girl                     crying                          in the center of a circle—
felt                               my selves                     begin to double.
How                             did I know                    I was different?
I told the teacher           and she                        put them in timeout. 
But what about             the little girl                  rolling away, struck
with the red                  hot g sounds                 ringing fire songs
in her ears?                   You never forget          the first time
you are branded            with iron—                   seared raw, permanent. 
 

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/01/2018
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.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"If Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood were a blank book bearing that title alone, I would still feel like I was in the presence of a profound lyric gift. It’s astonishing, the heft of that declaration, and the way these poems rise up to meet its rigor and clarity. Toni Morrison commanded writers to “make it political as hell, and make it irrevocably beautiful.” Clark, as if in response, writes, “Let us marvel at the Love and Grace that bought / and brought us here.” The formal dexterity of these poems, the vision that takes us from Daphne to Lorca to Phillis Wheatley to Balanchine to Rihanna to Rukeyser, announces a significant and comprehensive new poetic talent. This beauty is irrevocable—Clark has written one of the best first books of poetry I have ever read."——Kaveh Akbar  

“Critiquing the commodification of black pain while also acknowledging and revealing your hurt as a black person is tricky as hell.  It is dangerous.  And that is precisely what Tiana Clark does in these beautiful, vulnerable, honest poems.  It is a kind of tenderness, and a kind of belief.  A reaching toward.  It is a kind of care.”—Ross Gay
 

 
“Superlatives for new poets are distressingly common these days, so a reader may not believe me when I say this debut collection is a book that I have waited for all my life. It is a book of relentless beauty about all the territory African-Americans hold close under whispered breaths, an accumulation of history and beauty that I find heartbreaking and breathtaking. More than necessary reading; it's soul-saving. Read it, and be changed and redeemed.”
—Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman

"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 Sealy, and Airea D. Matthews."
—Booklist , starred review 

"Clark bridges a Tennessee landscape's past and present in her stellar debut, evincing a potent mix of history, injury, and divided identity."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review 

"An honest, punch-angry portrait of being American while black."
—Library Journal 

From the Publisher

09/15/2018
"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.

Library Journal

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