Bøker av Chaun Ballard

Winner of the 23rd annual PoulinPrize, Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences,historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory thatcelebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.Riddled with the ghostly voices of family andfriends, Second Nature is fearless inits wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In thesepoems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglas have a conversation, Michael Brownmeditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings insonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a newgeneration.Through innovative re-imaginings of thesonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popularculture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form andcontent, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife,and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintainstructures of oppression.Interspersed with quotations and inspired bythe rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenodawho provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature isa testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we comefrom, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped bycommunity and country.­­­

Flight gives testament to the struggle of skin color in contemporary America. Utilizing both innovation and tradition, Chaun Ballard's poems give voice to the silenced, proof to the disenfranchised, and life to the gone. "The poems in Flight unspool a rich and charmed history of survival into songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race; many of the poems in this collection explore (or allude to) the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson with a brilliance that is underscored by the poet's extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears." --Major Jackson