Second Nature

Winner of the 23rd annual

A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

Chaun Ballard's gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences,

historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that

celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.

Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and

friends, Second Nature is fearless in

its wrestling with America's fractured past and troubled present. In these

poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown

meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor's guitar sings in

sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new

generation.

Through innovative re-imaginings of the

sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular

culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together--form and

content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife,

and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain

structures of oppression.

Interspersed with quotations and inspired by

the rich legacy of poets who came before him--including poet Matthew Shenoda

who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection--Second Nature is

a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come

from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one's identity is shaped by

community and country.---