University of Wisconsin Press, paperback
Publication Date: March 21st, 2023
Publisher Marketing: “No poet I’ve worked with in forty years’ teaching has wowed me more with his talent & smarts & heart than young Joshua Burton. His first collection, Grace Engine, is destined to be this year’s star debut.”
—Mary Karr
Grief is a healthy disease / unlike forgetting.
Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed
themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”
