*Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award*
*National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist*
*Included in The New York Times Best Poetry of 2016*
*Named one of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of
2016*
* Longlisted for the National Book Award*
"Blackacre" is a centuries-old legal fiction--a placeholder name for a
hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems
reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy--a bereavement, an
intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis.
With a surveyor's keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given,
what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced,
previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In
the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of
Milton's great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her
barrenness, on her own desire--her own struggle--to conceive a child.
What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the
limits of unalterable fact?