Shade Is a Place - (Penguin Poets) by Makshya Tolbert (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a "startlingly original debut" (Maggie Millner) that meanders toward possibilities of arboreal relief among entanglements of place, property, and urban planning in Charlottesville, Virginia

Shade is a place meanders east-west along Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, seeking "a Black sense of place" at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall's architectural history, and the speaker's ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one's attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems ("tree walks" and "shade walks") and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one's inner life--sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.

Review Quotes

Advance Praise for Shade is a place:

"Shade is a place consciously extends the American tradition of documentary poetics, plaited here with a Black feminist, ecopoetic vision distinctly Tolbert's own. 'Tell the trees I'm sorry / for taking so long to see them, ' she writes, casting us in the brilliant shade of her devotion to the world, and illumining even its darkest reaches with loving regard. This is simply an extraordinary book." --Maggie Millner, author of Couplets

About the Author

MaKshya Tolbert serves as the chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission and as the guest curator for the New City Arts Fellowship. A graduate of the University of Virginia's Creative Writing MFA program, Tolbert is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from Community of Writers, Tin House, and Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc. with work in the Kenyon Review and Tupelo Quarterly, among other outlets. In free moments, Tolbert is elsewhere--a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls "that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe."