Description

University of Wisconsin Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 21st, 2023

Publisher Marketing: No poet Ive 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 years star debut.
Mary Karr

Grief is a healthy disease / unlike forgetting.

Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.

I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed

themselves of shame
and before that.
Excerpt from Grace Engine