Tiana Clark

Winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize For me, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that I cannot escape, but one that I have learned to lean into as I delve into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, my own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can't Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because I cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past--I will always see blood on the leaves.

I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. "EQUILIBRIUM searches for that point where there is a balance, even as the poems display a consciousness and self-awareness that belie that balance. The poems negotiate the colossal movement of hearts figuring and being figured by history. This is a voice that knows the intelligence of passion, that moves through and inside the questioning of who we are in the structures of things we give the power to name us until a song sends us out to question the territory. The poet moves with the exactness of math or physics, with the fearful knowledge of careful imbalances that would have us believe in equilibrium, and with the assuredness of art that knows all is change, that the semblance of order is creation, something we are given the gift of imitating in some small way. The poems in this collection summon the largeness, the volume of a voice that disembodies itself in order to search for the love that made it whole." —Afaa Michael Weaver

Poems

Equilibrium

2025 National Book Award Finalist The striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the “beautiful, vulnerable, honest” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author) I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys. From a generational voice that “earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve L. Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews” (Booklist, starred review), Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.

Scorched Earth

"SCORCHED EARTH moves between ruins and radical love-fragility and tenderness in the wake of a divorce transform and expand into virtuosic stanzas, full of ache and sweetness. From ekphrastic poems on Kara Walker, to a standout series on the first Black Bachelorette, Clark's stanzas shift between reverence and irreverence, hold institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys"--

Tiana Clark

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