Made to Explode
Poems
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
With lacerating honesty, technical mastery, and abiding compassion, Made to Explode offers volatile poems for our volatile times.
In her fourth collection, acclaimed poet Sandra Beasley interrogates the landscapes of her life in decisive, fearless, and precise poems that fuse intimacy and intensity. She probes memories of growing up in Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson’s shadow, where liberal affluence obscured and perpetuated racist aggressions, but where the poet was simultaneously steeped in the cultural traditions of the American South. Her home in Washington, DC, inspires prose poems documenting and critiquing our capital’s institutions and monuments.
In these poems, Ruth Bader Ginsberg shows up at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s show of Kiss Me Kate; Albert Einstein is memorialized on Constitution Avenue, yet was denied clearance for the Manhattan Project; as temperatures cool, a rain of spiders drops from the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. A stirring suite explores Beasley’s affiliation with the disability community and her frustration with the ways society codes disability as inferiority.
Quintessentially American and painfully timely, these poems examine legacies of racism and whiteness, the shadow of monuments to a world we are unmaking, and the privileges the poet is working to untangle. Made to Explode boldly reckons with Beasley’s roots and seeks out resonance in society writ large.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The vibrant fourth collection from Beasley (Count the Waves) offers a litany of sensual pleasures and careful self-reckoning. Playful considerations of peaches, fried fish, grits, and other foods serve the poet to wide-ranging ends. Imagining the painter Marc Chagall transplanted from Belarus to Biloxi, the poet rhapsodizes about the silver fish native to the Gulf: "holy mullet would/ ring over his rooftops—// mullet, on violin—rooster/ and mullet, mullet and goat," and muses, "how one// can scavenge the bottom/ and still rise, without apology,/ by the silvered dozen." A series of ekphrastic prose poems at the book's center describe national monuments, relying on their less than subtle ironies. On Roosevelt's memorial: "This sculpted wall is supposed to speak of WPA, CCC, the alphabet agencies. But its Braille dots are oversized beyond any one fingertip. This is gibberish, a visitor says, feeling the spaces between." Throughout the book, the poet contends with the pain of coming to terms with her Southern white heritage. A poem about whiteness, in which "my performative strip of self/ still trash up the place," ends with an ancestral invocation: "Virginia, my ghosts/ need gathering./ Come to the table/ and sit, goddamit. Sit." Beasley uses her trademark humor and wit to explore the heavier parts of personal and national identity in this energetic and varied outing.
