The title of this collection is arresting—Scorched Earth, a phrase used to describe the destructive wake left by General Sherman’s march through Georgia at the end of the Civil War. That association is strengthened by the extraordinary cover featuring Kara Walker’s Buzzard’s Roost Pass, which is printed over an 1864 illustration of one of Sherman and Johnston’s battles. Would you tell us how you chose this title and cover? How are you hoping they will set up readers for the book?
I was commissioned by Matt Donovan, the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, to write an ekphrastic poem [a poem that describes a work of art] for a book he was editing titled The Map of Every Lilac Leaf: Poets Respond to SCMA (Smith College Museum of Art). When Matt mentioned they had a Kara Walker piece in storage, I was instantly intrigued. I’ve admired Walker’s work for years but had never experienced it in person. When I finally saw Buzzard’s Roost Pass, I was transfixed. I couldn’t look away from the black silhouette cutouts of a Black woman’s face and broken body, disassembled and spread across a haunting Civil War landscape.
For me, ekphrasis is all about “breaching the boundary,” an idea articulated by Edward Hirsch, who describes it as when “the writer enters into the spatial realm, traducing an abyss, violating the silent integrity of the pictorial.” This act of transgression felt particularly potent as I explored Walker’s work, which, as David Wall observes, wrestles with the “dark gothic underbelly of the American fabric,” forcing viewers into disturbing confrontations with violence and depravity. Through this process of ekphrastic interrogation, I wrote my poem “Scorched Earth.” I even printed Walker’s lithograph and wrote “dream cover” across the top, hanging it in hope in my office for years as the book coalesced.
When I secured my book deal with Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press, I immediately shared my vision and big wish for the cover. She made it happen, and I was ecstatic and beyond grateful when Kara Walker granted us permission to use her iconic image!
I hope the title and cover work in tandem to set up and subvert the political and personal stakes of the collection—interrogating how race, sex, violence and history collide within the cavalcade of poems. As Wall notes, Kara Walker’s work challenges viewers to confront their own complicity in “producing, consuming, and populating the vicious landscapes of racial and sexual representation.” In this way, I aimed not to exploit but to echo her transgressive charge in my poetry, inviting readers to grapple with these bruised truths while still reaching for joy—Black joy.
You’ve spoken before about how much you love epigraphs, and there’s even a “Broken Ode for the Epigraph” in this book, which hails the device as a “little cup holder” and an “amuse-bouche.” I wondered if you would tell us about your favorite epigraph in the collection. How did you come across it, and why did you choose it?
I constantly collect and archive lines, quotes and passages from multiple texts across genres. Perhaps this stems from my tendency to hoard—both on and off the page (ha!)—believing I will stash away these words for when I need them, like a squirrel furiously burying nuts in preparation for scarcity.
In this way, creating a cache of beloved quotes feels like I’m taking care of myself by crafting my own scrapbook for survival—chock-full of small truths I want to remember and return to. I grew up in church, memorizing and rereading proverbs and psalms, so perhaps, in some way, this passionate epigraphical practice is my form of secular scripture—my way of living with dictums I hold dear and deem as divine.
It’s hard to choose my favorite epigraph from the book because I truly love them all. Today, I’ll focus on Jericho Brown’s epigraph from my poem “When I Kissed Her Right Breast, I Became Myself Entirely,” which reads, “Gratitude is black—” from his stunning poem “Hero” in The Tradition. I see this epigraph in conversation (and holding hands) with a line from Robin Coste Lewis’ poem “Landscape,” which is also referenced in my book and begins, “Pleasure is black.” I love the idea of situating Blackness within the tender worlds of gratitude and pleasure as a form of soft reclamation—a necessary step toward freedom. This reminds me of radical self-love and bell hooks, who wrote, “Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed.”
I think it’s worth mentioning that when Lewis wrote about her poem “Landscape,” she said, “I’m trying to find a new language, or I should say a new English—one that both acknowledges the historical ruin inherent in English, but—because of that ruin—is also a vast open space. I like the ashes.” This idea of recognizing ruin as indictment and exploration feels akin to my dual—and at times dueling—desires as I wrote my way through the historical and psychological landscapes of Scorched Earth. This friction with language contends with my complicated relationship to the archive, which exploits as much as it erases the broken Black body throughout history.
I’m not interested in romanticizing the spectacle of suffering, but I am determined to interrogate and imagine innovative ways to disrupt cliched narratives of Blackness through subversion, speculation and transgression—while also reaching for, and never forgetting, what joy can make possible in my work. For me, this artistic intention must be grounded in, and continually return to, gratitude and pleasure—the revised definitions from Brown and Lewis—which remind me that I am more than what I have endured.
“To me, self-implication functions like adding acid to a dish: its brightness cuts through and balances the bitterness.”
Something I love in your work is how you amalgamate history and popular culture—The Bachelorette, the Great Train Wreck of 1918, FOMO, Phillis Wheatley, Cardi B, the Middle Passage—reminding us of how history lives on in the present, and how what’s present is always in the process of becoming history. I read an interview in Booth where you said that you entertained the idea of becoming a historian in college. Has that aspiration transmuted into your work as a poet?
I initially thought I wanted to be a historian because of my deep love for African American history, which led me to major in Africana Studies in college. During my junior year, I applied for and received an incredible summer internship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York—a decision that pinballed my life into poetry by provocation.
During the summer of 2008, I walked daily over the ashes of Langston Hughes, interred underneath the glittering terrazzo of the Schomburg lobby, where his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is inscribed. Hughes wouldn’t leave me alone. I felt his ghost pinging me, insisting I was supposed to be a poet, not a historian. Instead of writing paragraphs for my research paper on the Harlem Renaissance, my time with the archive and microfiche at the library poured out as poems. Bewildered, I took the F train to Coney Island, and while staring out over the pier at the shore, I finally shouted back at the waves, “OK, Langston! Fine—I’ll be a poet!”
This catalytic moment crystallized my relationship with the historical archive, shaped by my compulsion to translate research through the alchemy of creative writing—colliding the personal and the political through the raw, transformative power of metaphor and prosody. It didn’t have to be a binary choice. I could be a poet utilizing the methods of a historian invested in translating the lacunae by excavating the often buried or palimpsestic African American stories of survival and beauty beyond the brutality and erasure foregrounded in the archive.
Through poetry, I was able to “speak” to Phillis Wheatley, Nina Simone, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker and Rihanna, along with other Black artists in my work, to better understand myself and build a legacy of models and mirrors—both past and present—that I can look up to, engage with, and see myself reflected back from a Black perspective.
This conjuring practice became my own lyrical way of navigating what Saidiya Hartman calls “a history written with & against the archive,” while also subverting the traditional Western literary canon to create my own compendium of Black persistence. This personal repertoire taught me how to “hold on,” work that, as Alice Walker states, “Black women have done for a very long time.” I also learned this type of perseverance from the single Black mother who raised and instilled in me a sense of radical self-confidence against all odds.
Since writing, for me, is a form of survival—but beyond the need to simply endure—I hope to thrive as I seek more portals of possibility in poetry and prose.
These poems are remarkable in their willingness to contradict or correct—which you acknowledge in these lines from “Proof”: “I think it’s important to implicate / the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean.” Could you tell us why this double-edged sense of implication is important to you?
I think self-implication is vital for a poet. The weight of the poetic gaze can be heavy and all-consuming. In the past, I’ve made mistakes when writing about complex situations inspired by real-life events and people who have hurt me. Through those experiences, I realized that while it wasn’t wrong to write about my pain, I wished I had done a better job of balancing that harm with an acknowledgment of my own complicity—turning the intensity of the gaze back onto myself with the same level of scrutiny and examination.
Not all the time, but sometimes, that level of self-awareness is crucial from the speaker, especially in rendering the knotted emotional truth of an experience. Which is why the metaphor of the knife arrived while writing “Proof,” a poem about a tense moment between two people on the brink of divorce and the residue that remains after you hurt someone you love. I wanted to be truthful to the messiness in the aftermath of mistakes.
Natasha Trethewey has one of the most self-implicating lines I’ve ever read. In her poem “Elegy,” about fishing with the speaker’s father, she writes: “I can tell you now / that I tried to take it all in, record it / for an elegy I’d write — one day — / when the time came. Your daughter, / I was that ruthless.” Chills! I think about those last four words all the time. It’s astonishing how the speaker confesses to this compulsion. As writers, we often can’t resist the uncontrollable urge to alchemize moments into metaphors, even as they’re happening before us. I certainly have!
What draws me to this line is how deeply relatable it is, how flawed and human—especially when trying to render our parents in our poems (calling on Philip Larkin [“This Be the Verse”] here, ha!). I connect with it because I, too, have been merciless. I, too, have a complicated relationship with my father. To me, self-implication functions like adding acid to a dish: its brightness cuts through and balances the bitterness.
“As I get older, I find myself wanting to be freer in my poems just as much as I want to safeguard myself within them.”
You’ve taught poetry at Smith College (I was one of your students!), the Sewanee School of Letters and elsewhere. A wonderful moment in “50 Lines after Figure (2001) by Glenn Ligon” comes when you describe helping students see what rules they can break in their poems: “50 invisible permission slips sparkling in their eyeballs—THAT GLEAM THOUGH.” What’s something new you granted yourself permission to do in this book?
So many poets I adore have written poems that feel like potent permission slips, encouraging me to take risks, play with form, employ new techniques and explore themes I once considered taboo or forbidden—poets like Sharon Olds, Terrance Hayes and Hanif Abdurraqib, to name just a few from my ever-expanding list of luminaries.
For Scorched Earth, I wanted to remind myself and relearn what I strive to impart to my students by graciously granting myself the utmost permission to be fully myself—flaws and all—in whatever wonky, silly, verbose, irreverent or sentimental ways my beloved quirks and idiosyncrasies manifested in my work. I wasn’t trying to make mistakes, but if they came, then I wanted to let my blunders become material for radical embodiment and lyrical aliveness—which, of course, reminds me of Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende: the raw, mysterious force that “burns the blood like powdered glass” and wrestles with artists, where wounds and imperfections create unrepeatable, “storm-filled” moments charged with ferocious depth, passionate fury and magnetic authenticity—death-haunted with ache and wonder.
I love these magnificent lines from Rainer Maria Rilke: “I want to unfold. / I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, / because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” I love this idea of unfolding—unfurling flaws, unspooling the self—which, for me, means releasing myself from the stress of perfection, from the urge to conceal how awkwardly human, feverishly feral and gloriously weird I am.
As I get older, I find myself wanting to be freer in my poems just as much as I want to safeguard myself within them—and by self, I mean the amalgamation of me(s) vis-a-vis the speaker—speaking through the multitudinous masks of the lyric “I,” a collage of real and imagined versions of myself, all trying to unfold by remaining honest to the emotional truth, all trying to recall Fernando Pessoa’s salient words: “There are more I’s than I myself.”
Don’t get me wrong—deception, at times, serves a vital function for survival, like Scheherazade staving off death with a captivating story and a well-timed cliffhanger, or Penelope weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law by day and unraveling her work by night to fend off suitors, prolonging time as she waits for Odysseus to return.
Or the right to opacity as a tool of rebellion and resistance—a theory from the late Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, who celebrated the refusal of transparency in praise of the inaccessible and untranslatable, both culturally and personally. As a post-colonial framework, opacity resists hegemonic power, exemplified by Creole in the Caribbean plantation system, where encoded language allowed privacy between slaves to communicate without the master having access to their speech.
These deft and cunning literary examples reveal a crucial truth about the role of art and the discursive power of storytelling, especially for those of us who live, resist and make art from the margins: Whether we reveal, conceal, deceive or even mess up, we are ultimately trying to outlive what might destroy us.
When teaching students to put together chapbooks, you’ve said that each poetry collection should have at least one poem that gestures at, or perhaps belongs to, the next book you’ll write. Is there one of these poems in Scorched Earth, and if so, what is it pointing toward?
Yes, there is a poem that serves as a bridge to my next book. When shaping the narrative and emotional arc of Scorched Earth, I initially wanted to end with “The Terror of New Love!” However, I wasn’t satisfied with concluding on a note that felt potentially saccharine or overly salvific—finding new love after divorce. Although the entrance of this new lover is spectacular and signifies a brave transformation—timidly wanting, trying, hoping and opening up to love again—I didn’t want the speaker to seem redeemed by another person.
Ironically, while the speaker isn’t saved by a partner, it was my partner who suggested adding “Maybe in Another Life” as an epilogue poem. The more I thought about it, the placement started to make sense, snapping into place like the final, satisfying click of a puzzle piece, which accomplished my twin goals of creating a celebratory yet still unresolved coda—one that resists a definitive resolution but instead acts as a hinge, closing and opening, embodying the complex conundrum of whether or not to have children, followed by the radical self-acceptance of not knowing the answers or the outcome.
I hoped for a more realistic rather than romanticized portrayal of the speaker’s journey—one that begins in ruins and ends on the shore in Margate, in love again, yes, but also content in solitude, still striving to embrace the Keatsian “negative capabilities” that life tends to toggle, tangle and untangle ad infinitum.
The epilogue poem subverts the idea of ending with a bang, instead dwelling in flux—the liminal nuance within terminal closure—making peace with all that is known and unknown by mirroring the poem’s soft waves as they ebb and flow, foreshadowing a thematic sneak peek into prose.
Fans of your essays (on Black millennial burnout and writing after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics) will be excited to hear about your upcoming memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved—your nonfiction debut. Do you have anything to share about the experience of working in prose?
I will never forget when Ann Patchett visited Vanderbilt during my MFA program for a talk. She emphasized that in our work, we should always reach for something higher—beyond what we believe we can accomplish. Venturing into prose has been that ambitious leap and feat for me.
I was already writing long poems, so expanding into essays felt somewhat natural at first. Yet, writing prose has humbled and surprised me, challenging me to rethink my relationship to form in creative nonfiction. I love cross-pollinating my poetic instincts into my memoir-in-progress, channeling Baudelaire’s famous imperative to always be a poet, even in prose.
I’ve also been leaning heavily on poets who write across genres—Saeed Jones, Maggie Nelson, Maggie Smith, Ross Gay and Ocean Vuong—rereading their work for insight and inspiration as I chart my own lyric-driven path in prose.
Writing this memoir has been a wild joy—a broader river to wade into my obsessions and themes as I reckon with Black burnout—both what it is and what I hope lies beyond the racialized stress and terror—alongside millennial divorce, faith, art-making and the evolving, radical methods of Black survival. I’m excited to share it soon!
Photo of Tiana Clark © Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography.
