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Scorched Earth: Poems

by Tiana Clark
Washington Square. Mar. 2025. 128p. ISBN 9781668052075. pap. $17.99. POETRY
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Multi-prize-winning poet Clark (I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood) offers a second volume of poems that trace the narrator’s journey from the first days of divorce (as in the poem “Proof” in which the lines “People get weird about divorce. Think it’s contagious.” create an overarching statement) to new love (some moments of hope are found in “The Terror of New Love”: “your arms another possible / home”). These poems are breathless and wandering (or wondering?), and while often long, are keenly observant and perceptive. “If my body be a long poem / then I want it to go wherever it needs.” The narrator’s divorce creates a furious search for identity—as a woman, as a Black woman finding value in her blackness, as both a hetero and queer lover, as a woman coming to terms: “I become who I am by not knowing—.”
VERDICT Clark’s poems are a journey of astonishing clarity and vision.
Reviewed by Karla Huston , Dec 01, 2024
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