GRACE ENGINE
Grace Engine is a poetry manuscript concentrating on the micro effects of generational and familial trauma through one’s life. The poems meditate on the possibilities and shortcomings that comes with the myth of black strength. In order to better examine these ways of black living, the poems reaches out to family and other historical black figures who were cut off from history through lynchings or through black insanity. These people are held as statues and mirrors. The poems question whether black strength is an inherit part of blackness. We are told “black don’t crack” as a way to show the endurance of black bodies through this American war-field. But I believe the ability to cope under the worst of conditions shouldn’t rid us of the very human response of sometimes being broken. The poems hope to uncover the tension in this discussion. How does one manage the line between shame and accountability? How do you navigate a life knowing your black won’t break, even as it has always seemed to be just that.
Praise for GRACE ENGINE
“One of the most compelling books I have read this year. But what does that mean? It means that we are invited to enter the landscape where the speaker's ‘been having / a different relationship / with ghosts.’ It means that history is a catastrophe but a grandmother can turn ‘looking into a language, a season / whittled down to degrees.’ It means that the empire corrodes but there is still music which these pages unearth and offer, as a consolation, perhaps, no as evidence: evidence that the soul lives despite the terror of this time. Because Burton knows that ‘wind from a mouth can coax the flame into living,’ Grace Engine is inconsolable and yet consoling. A very beautiful book.”— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
“No poet I’ve worked with in forty years’ teaching has wowed me more with his talent & smarts & heart than young Joshua Burton. His first collection, Grace Engine, is destined to be this year’s star debut.”— Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liars’ Club
“With Grace Engine, Joshua Burton has given readers a remarkable meditation on the resilience of the Black spirit, subject to threat and terror from within and without. Against the restless ghosts of history, under the eyes of God, through the whispers of one’s own wounded heart, Burton has laid lines to page that explore the many meanings of grace and their contribution to keeping two feet planted firmly on the ground despite all odds and oppositions. This collection will move you with its honesty and courage. It will lift you. It will light a way through the darkness.”— Cortney Lamar Charleston, author of Doppelgangbanger and Telepathologies
“Grace Engine documents the ravages of internalized antiblackness in restless lines whose ‘Language is like a month ending / with a fire.’ To aid in reclaiming himself from Black social and literal death, Joshua Burton assembles an archive of Black men whose minds were troubled by antiblackness and Black folks whose lives were ended by it. In confronting textual and visual evidence of white supremacy, in placing family history alongside it, his speakers confront the decision of whether to stay in a world inseparable from racist violence. Ultimately coming to understand ‘how much my indecision is decision,’ he enters into a tentative, complex relation with Black aliveness. Burton might write ‘in the language of breakdown,’ but his speakers ‘choose to fill my hands with stay here.’ The way to bless once meant to mark with blood, this book is both balm and wound.” — Brian Teare author of Doomstead Days and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven