Description
Book Synopsis‘Words carry the dead like henchmen,’ in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume,
Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be.
Trade Review“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 “One of the most compelling books I have read this year. But what does that mean? It means that we are invited to enter the landscape where the speaker's ‘been having / a different relationship / with ghosts.’ It means that history is a catastrophe but a grandmother can turn ‘looking into a language, a season / whittled down to degrees.’ It means that the empire corrodes but there is still music which these pages unearth and offer, as a consolation, perhaps, no as evidence: evidence that the soul lives despite the terror of this time. Because Burton knows that ‘wind from a mouth can coax the flame into living,’
Grace Engine is inconsolable and yet consoling. A very beautiful book.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Deaf Republic and
Dancing in OdessaTable of ContentsI
The Hearing We Inherit 7
Grace & Pity 10
Death/Machine/Ruin 12
Grace Division 13
To those who count suicide as a spiritual warfare addendum 15
Royal 16
Man in a Hole 17
Death/Machine/Ruin 20
Elegy for Threats with Grace 21
Death/Machine/Ruin 24
Bayou City Season 25
Grace & Separation 28
A Consequence (Passing) 30
Ten Stories 34
We
The Mirror Myth 37
To those who think I won’t set this country afire with me still in it 42
A Constant Conjunction 43
( )
Giving Jim Grace 47
Prophet Royal Robertson 49
Giving Mary Grace 50
To those who know how to unthreat oneself 52
The Worst Houston 53
Grace Engine 55
Giving Laura Grace 57
Grace as Kin as Sin as Skin 59
A Confession 60
As I Grace Myself into a Rephrasing Freedom 62
Notes 63
Acknowledgments 65
