Tiana Clark

Advance Praise for SCORCHED EARTH

“A formally kaleidoscopic work that oscillates between history, family, friendship, love, and the vexed precarity of modern life, Scorched Earth both challenges and soothes at once. But what I love most  about these poems, and in Tiana’s poems at large, is the way they name and hold the archive, the  barbed histories, the loved ones and the nemeses in our world, with such intelligent tenderness. Here,  the ache of lived experience is recast, as it is in our most indelible poems, as sites of wonder and  luminosity, where our wounds are—thank god—not merely subjects, but methods.” 

—Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“‘I still want joy at the end,’ Tiana Clark writes in Scorched Earth, her searing, expansive new collection  of poems. This book begins with an end—the speaker’s divorce—and the poems unpack what it means  to have outlived the life you’d expected to have. ‘If my body be a long poem,’ Clark writes, ‘then I want  it to go wherever it needs.’ These are poems of Black joy, queer love, and radical acceptance of the self.  Scorched Earth is a hell of a book.” 

—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Scorched Earth is quite the title for this stunning volume in which Tiana Clark challenges our notions  of just how many times a poem can turn and just how much any poem can hold. Each page reads as  if it is hungry for understanding—of divorce, of Blackness, of the American South, of poetry itself:  ‘I want to peg / the canon. So I am running back / and forth between the house of silence / and the  house of shame . . . ’ Clark’s is an ever-evolving voice that we need to hear!” 

—Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition 

“I can give three reasons for why Tiana Clark is a great poet. One—her self-intimacy is really shocking  and strong—and she owns it. Two—she knows where to stop (i.e., end the poem), she puts her finger  on it, and it’s true or it feels true. Ultimately, her poetry is one big safe word. That’s three. It’s crazy  gorgeous, and it stops everything.” 

—Eileen Myles, author of I Must Be Living Twice

“To read Scorched Earth is to touch the electric fire of Tiana Clark’s mind—crackling with visceral,  wonderfully dangerous poems exploring the feminine erotic, she writes unapologetically about Black  womanhood, sexuality, desire, and its mirror world of grief, doubt, and unbelonging. This collection is  a celebration of the expense of Black femininity as its own cosmos of possibility. What a joy to see a  poet write so deliciously toward longing, yearning, and, ultimately, her own incendiary self.” 

—Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon