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by MaKshya Tolbert
From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a lyrical debut that explores the social and ecological relief trees can provide within the entanglements of place, property, urban planning, and racial terror 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.
"A strong debut, at home in any collection of modern American poetry." —Library Journal
"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
"Where to find relief in a city that by design thwarts your thriving? How to heal in a place with a history of harm? MaKshya Tolbert brings these questions to downtown Charlottesville's mature willow oaks, 'sick and stressed and alive, strung from this land.' Acutely attuned to these trees, Tolbert gets involved in their care as a way to study survival under duress. 'A green book for walkers' and a Black book of nature, Shade is a place is above all 'a compass of what matters.' Let it guide you." —Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
This information about Shade is a place was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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."
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