Monica Youn’s Blackacre: Poetry Collection

Description

Graywolf, paperback

Publication Date: September 06, 2016

Publisher Marketing: “Blackacre” is a centuries-old legal fiction–a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy–a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire–her own struggle–to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?

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