Second Nature - Chaun Ballard

Winner of the 23rd annual Poulin \nPrize \n\n Chaun Ballard's gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, \nhistorical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that \ncelebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban. \n\n \nRiddled with the ghostly voices of family and \nfriends, Second Nature is fearless in \nits wrestling with America's fractured past and troubled present. In these \npoems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown \nmeditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor's guitar sings in \nsonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new \ngeneration.\n \nThrough innovative re-imaginings of the \nsonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular \nculture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together--form and \ncontent, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, \nand a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain \nstructures of oppression.\n \nInterspersed with quotations and inspired by \nthe rich legacy of poets who came before him--including poet Matthew Shenoda \nwho provides an insightful Foreword to the collection--Second Nature is \na testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come \nfrom, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one's identity is shaped by \ncommunity and country.---\n