Scorched Earth

The striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the "beautiful, vulnerable, honest" (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author) I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.

Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.

From a generational voice that "earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve L. Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews" (Booklist, starred review), Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.

"An absolutely magnificent collection of poetry. Clark has a really deft hand with poetic forms...the emotional tenor of the poems, the sensual imagery, the voice."
--Roxane Gay, New York Times bestelling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
"Tiana Clark's words met me where I was -- equal parts heartache, nostalgia, and ultimately healing. Accessible and lyrical, even when I couldn't relate to the scope of Clark's experiences, I still felt like I was offered a chair to sit and witness. The other relevant themes of sexuality and Black joy in this collection had me underlining and dog-earring almost every page."
--The Southern Bookseller
"With Scorched Earth, Tiana Clark has sculpted a collection for those who love literature and who wrestle with what it means to love themselves."
--BookPage
"Writing on the heels of divorce, Clark channels desperation, humor, desire, and anger into themes of race, sex, and relationships .... These are wonderfully intertextual poems bristling with bright intelligence, formal variation, and outlandishly feral longing."
--Booklist
"To read Scorched Earth is to touch the electric fire of Tiana Clark's mind--crackling with visceral, wonderfully dangerous poems exploring the feminine erotic, she writes unapologetically about Black womanhood, sexuality, desire, and its mirror world of grief, doubt, and unbelonging. This collection is a celebration of the expanse of Black femininity as its own cosmos of possibility. What a joy to see a poet write so deliciously toward longing, yearning, and ultimately, her own incendiary self."
--Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon
"I can give three reasons for why Tiana Clark is a great poet. One-her self intimacy is really shocking & strong--& she owns it: "O tiana I want to love you there." Two-she knows where to stop (i.e. end the poem) she puts her finger on it, and it's true or it feels true. Ultimately, her poetry is one big safe word. That's three. I never heard it before, it's crazy gorgeous, and it stops everything."
--Eileen Myles, author of I Must Be Living Twice
"Scorched Earth is quite the title for this stunning volume in which Tiana Clark challenges our notions of just how many times a poem can turn and just how much any poem can hold. Each page reads as if it is hungry for understanding--of divorce, of Blackness, of the American South, of poetry itself: 'I want to peg/the canon. So I am running back/and forth between the house of silence/and the house of shame...' Clark's is an ever evolving voice that we need to hear!"
--Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tradition
"'I still want joy in the end, ' Tiana Clark writes in Scorched Earth, her searing, expansive new collection of poems. This book begins with an end--the speaker's divorce--and the poems unpack what it means to have outlived the life you'd expected to have. 'If my body be a long poem, ' Clark writes, 'then I want it to go wherever it needs.' These are poems of black joy, queer love, and radical acceptance of the self. Scorched Earth is a hell of a book."
--Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
"A formally kaleidoscopic work that oscillates between history, family, friendship, love, and the vexed precarity of modern life, Scorched Earth both challenges and soothes at once. But what I love most about these poems, and in Tiana's poems at large, is the way they name and hold the archive, the barbed histories, the loved ones and the nemeses in our world, with such intelligent tenderness. Here, the ache of lived experience is recast, as it is in our most indelible poems, as sites of wonder and luminosity, where our wounds are--thank god--not merely subjects, but methods."
--Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark's other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women's studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com.

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