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3.0 

Blackacre

By Monica Youn
Blackacre by Monica Youn digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

*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?

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6 Reviews

3.0
“Necessity is not a weaver, there is no spindle in her hand; it is a woman wearing a steel collar, wearing a stiffly pleated dress, which lifts to reveal nothing but fabric where her body used to be. This book did nothing for me the first time I read it. Once I was forced into the ridiculous routine of having to crap out a four-page response and had to re-read the poems I marked (plus some interviews for extra context), I realized that this was actually pretty good. I did love Youn's poetry because it was so familiar, even if the language at times made it inaccessible. It doesn't mean that it isn't easy to read, it's just hard to understand at times. Nevertheless, Youn is the queen of imagery. Most of my post-it notes are just me squeeing about how beautiful a turn of phrase was.”

About Monica Youn

Monica Youn is the author of two previous poetry collections, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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