Second Nature - Softcover

Ballard, Chaun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1960145525 ISBN 13: 9781960145529

Verlag: BOA Editions Ltd., 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the 23rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.

Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation.

Through innovative re-imaginings of the sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form and content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain structures of oppression.

Interspersed with quotations and inspired by the rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenoda who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature is a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped by community and country.­­­

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chaun Ballard is a doctoral student of poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of the chapbook Flight (Tupelo Press), which received the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Ballard's poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The New York Times, and other literary magazines. Ballard lives in Lincoln, NE.

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Landscape

after William Carlos Williams

Our neighborhood of stolen bikes, backyards, & so

-called conditions of standard living (where nothing was much),

Papa would drive up, reverse, & parallel into his spot like the spot depends

on the smoothness of his return. Wednesdays upon

the red brick column we leaned, porch heavy & lethargic like a

scene to be duplicated the next week. I would eyeball the red

brick weighed between brothers. Brushstroke my hands over the worn flaws. & a wheel,

accompanied by other wheels, would always come to a halt whenever a child would barrow

across the one-way like he was tethered to a friend—or a loose ball glazed

in bacon grease & popcorn oil. Sometimes those headlights froze on a naked dime with

-out renaming a street, avenue, or lane, but often they did not. Rain

was the usual culprit fingered in a series of lineups. Valvoline & water,

the other that shot mothers out of starting blocks, Jackie-Joyner-Kersee beside

their child lying broken in the

road. From our red brick America, this was our rerun, our white

picket fence, our Wednesday evenings Papa made it home, jivin’ he saw a man about a duck.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1960145525
• ISBN 13: 9781960145529
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 126
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar