Book Description

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Winner of the 2018 Nelson Poetry Award from the Kansas Authors Club. Aaron Brown's ACACIA ROAD moves between the past and the present, and the known and the unknown, wandering the rooms of memory and the knowledge of the body. But ACACIA ROAD also evokes real places, full of real lives and hard lessons, deeply felt and evocatively rendered. The narratives in this book resist easy certainty, and the images suggest how distance is both a measure of miles, and an important emotional register, as a cloud-like voice rises up to say, 'pay attention / or you will / miss your destination.' And these poems do pay close attention. To language--'I knew how to sing a little.' To time--'then and only then could we share a kind of silence, the pause between one cup of tea and the next.' And, ultimately, to the questions that remain for all of us as we travel together: 'Now, as the meat on my bones passes through death's teeth, will you remember me?' One way I measure the impact of a book is in my desire to start over again when I am finished, and it was a deep pleasure to turn and return to the mysterious and familiar roads of these richly imagined poems.--Jenny Browne, judge for the 2018 Nelson Poetry Award These poems proceed by an earnest story-telling and remembering. And while the surfaces of the poems are characterized by skillful narrative and descriptive impulses, underpinning most of them runs a deeper agon and self-critique, uncovering both a fear of and a relentless thirst for the ecstatic. These poems embody, at their best, that thirst.--Li-Young Lee