Blackacre: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781555977504)

*Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award*
*National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist*
*Included in The New York Times Best Poetry of 2016*
*Named one of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2016*
* Longlisted for the National Book Award*

"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?

Author: Monica Youn
ISBN-10: 1555977502
ISBN-13: 9781555977504
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 09/06/2016
Pages: 88
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.90w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2016 pg. 99
Publishers Weekly 08/15/2016