We Inherit What the Fires Left

by William Evans

Overview

William Evans, the award-winning poet and cofounder of the popular culture website Black Nerd Problems, offers an emotionally vulnerable poetry collection exploring the themes of inheritances, dreams, and injuries that are passed down from one generation to the next and delving into the lived experience of a black man in the American suburbs today.

In We Inherit What the Fires Left, award-winning poet William Evans embarks on a powerful new collection that explores the lived experience of race in the American suburbs and what dreams and injuries are passed from generation to generation. Fall under the spell of Evans’s boldly intimate, wise, and emotionally candid voice in these urgent, electrifying poems.

This eloquent collection explores not only what these inheritances are composed of, but what price the bearer must pay for such legacies, and the costly tolls exacted on both body and spirit. Evans writes searingly from the perspective of the marginalized, delivering an unflinching examination of what it is like to be a black man raising a daughter in predominantly white spaces, and the struggle to build a home and a future while carrying the weight of the past.

However, in beautiful and quiet scenes of domesticity with his daughter or in thoughtful reflection within himself, Evans offers words of hope to readers, proving that resilience can ultimately bloom even in the face of prejudice. Readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanif Abdurraqib will find a brilliant, fresh new talent to add to their lists in William Evans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982127398
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	638,882
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

William Evans is an author, speaker, performer, and instructor known for founding the Writing Wrongs Poetry Slam and cofounding the popular website Black Nerd Problems. He has been a national finalist in multiple poetry slam competitions and was the recipient of both the 2016 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant and the 2018 Spirit of Columbus Foundation Grant. The Callaloo and Watering Hole fellow is the author of three poetry collections and currently lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio. He is an MFA candidate at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Grass Growing Wild Beneath Us 1

The Engine 3

The Trail Says Three Point One Miles 5

Interrogation 7

Soft Prayer for the Teething 9

Little Lie 11

Mimic 13

Because I Was Once Good 15

On the First Snowfall 17

Inheritance 19

Good Storm 21

Jordans 23

Haunt 25

In the Event They Find Me Floating 27

Waves 29

Through the Night 31

Homecoming 33

Sometimes We Can't Do Anything about the Blood 35

Backfire 37

Inheritance 39

Might Have to Kill 41

Clean 43

Sharks and Minnows 45

Explaining Racism to My Seven-Year-Old 47

Briefly We Were 49

The Truth about Families 51

Descendant 53

Pledge to Raising a Black Girl 55

Inheritance 57

Passing for Day 59

Trespass 61

Turn Down For Naught 63

After the Storm, It Was Business as Usual 65

How to Assimilate 67

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/17/2020

Evans (Still Can’t Do My Daughter’s Hair) poignantly addresses in this vulnerable collection his experience raising his daughter in the suburbs while reckoning with the memory of his own father and childhood. In three titled sections—“Grass Growing Wild Beneath Us,” “Trespass,” and “Aging Out of Someone Else’s Dream”—Evans recounts the mundane moments of pride and learning that come with fatherhood, as well as the larger systemic threats and legacies of violence that underlie his experience as a black American. In “Waves,” his daughter asks a question about the ocean, which brings to mind the slaves forced to cross the Atlantic. The poem closes with acknowledging another threat: “On the ride home, after I have/ quieted the bark, an officer/ pulls us to the side of the road/ and asks me whose car I am driving/ my family home in.” In “Pledge to Raising a Black Girl,” he asks, “How do you know what you have a taste for// if you’ve been told never to show your teeth?... The elders want us to raise// girls with a song in their heart, but we only respect/ the classics if they respected us, which is why// if you ask me how I’m doing, I say still breathing.” These poems offer sensitive portraits of race and fatherhood and richly explore the past while providing hope for the future. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A tender, tender collection....The lines of Evans’s poetry radiate with such warmth, and the insight is as enveloping as a hug from a loved one." —Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing

“William Evans is a thoughtful truth teller, whose every word, beautifully woven, provides the gift of home to us. We are comforted, yet sharpened, by these poems. Evans fathers us deep into the arms of each story with assertiveness and delicacy.” —Jasmine Mans, poet, author of Black Girl, Call Home

"Evans may tackle ambitious subjects, but his dexterous use of language and emotion makes his book stand out. He somehow manages to make anew the timeless topics of race and familial love in a way that deserves to be heard." —The Michigan Daily

“These poems offer sensitive portraits of race and fatherhood and richly explore the past while providing hope for the future.” –Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher