The brilliant new collection by Monica Youn following Ignatz, a finalist for the National Book Award
Blackacre
Poems
- Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry
One of The New York Times Book Review's Best Poetry Collections of 2016
the trees all planted in the same month after the same fire
each thick around
as a man’s wrist
meticulously spaced grids cutting the sunshine
into panels into planks
and crossbeams of light
an incandescent architecture that is the home that was promised you
—from “Whiteacre”
each thick around
as a man’s wrist
meticulously spaced grids cutting the sunshine
into panels into planks
and crossbeams of light
an incandescent architecture that is the home that was promised you
—from “Whiteacre”
First coined in 1628, the term “blackacre” is a legal fiction, a hypothetical estate. It is also a password among lawyers marking one’s initiation into a centuries-old tradition of legal indoctrination. Monica Youn’s fascinating, multifaceted new collection, Blackacre, uses the term to suggest landscape, legacy, what is allotted to each of us—a tract of land, a work of art, a heritage, a body, a destiny. What are the limits of the imagination’s ability to transform what is given? On any particular acre, can we plant a garden? Found a city? Unearth a treasure? Build a home? Youn brings her lawyerly intelligence and lyric gifts to bear on questions of fertility and barrenness as she attempts to understand her own desire—her own struggle—to conceive a child. Where the shape-making mind encounters unalterable fact, Blackacre explores new territories of art, meaning, and feeling.
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About the Author
Credit: Sarah Shatz
Upcoming Events
Donika Kelly, Vijay Seshadri, and Monica Youn reading at 92Y
Date:
Location:
92nd St Y in New York, NYview map
"Paris Review Poets," a reading with Henri Cole, Shane McCrae, Jericho Brown, Lawrence Joseph, and Evie Shockley. Location: Buttenwieser Hall. Tickets are $15.
Praise
- “[Monica Youn is] one of the most consistently innovative poets working today.”—Tess Taylor, NPR “All Things Considered”
- “Blackacre stands as a gorgeous and intellectually scintillating addition to this esoteric and necessary tradition.”—Chicago Tribune
- “Youn reminds readers that poetry is essential because of how it says what can’t be expressed through prose.”—The Washington Post
- “[Blackacre] explores everything from racial identity to intfertility. . . . It’s grim, bleak, and haunting writing, and also beautiful.”—Bustle
