Second Nature

(Paperback)

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Winner of the 23^rd annual PoulinPrize, Chaun Ballard's gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences,historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory thatcelebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.

Riddled with the ghostly voices of family andfriends, Second Nature is fearless inits wrestling with America's fractured past and troubled present. In thesepoems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglas have a conversation, Michael Brownmeditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor's guitar sings insonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a newgeneration.

Through innovative re-imaginings of thesonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popularculture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together-form andcontent, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife,and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintainstructures of oppression.

Interspersed with quotations and inspired bythe rich legacy of poets who came before him-including poet Matthew Shenodawho provides an insightful Foreword to the collection-Second Nature isa testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we comefrom, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one's identity is shaped bycommunity and country.

Reviews

Chaun Ballards compelling debut collection, Second Nature, weds formal engagement and innovation with explorations of American history as it intersects with African American lives. An interrogation of archives and whats preserved there engenders voices of figures like Crispus Attucks. These poems rooted in those livesthe poets family and communitytake on broader implications when nonhuman beings like the weaver bird, the robin, and fireweed are brought into the conversations. These poems draw on the past for our present and future. Ultimately these poems are, as one of Ballards poems puts it, stories that should be ringing in the ear of each generation. Sean Hill author ofDangerous Goods

What you hold in your hands is a collection of poems that braids together the unencumbered memories of family lineage and African American history. Chaun Ballard explores what it means to be shaped by others, to make a way in the world carrying the pieces of the imperfect men and women who brought us to this moment. Ballards poems speak to the idea of a continuum, articulating the life of the poet on his own terms without forgetfulness or a simple investment in the fragmented lie of the individual. These are poems of community and history, of the collision of time, of what it means to live in ancestry and in the particulars of place. Matthew Shenoda, from the FOREWORD

Forthcoming blurb J. Drew Lanham

Author Bio

Chaun Ballard is a doctoral student of poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,an affiliate editor for AlaskaQuarterly Review, an assistantpoetry editor for PrairieSchooner, and an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org. He is the author of the chapbook Flight, which receivedthe 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. Ballard'spoems have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, PoetryNorthwest, The Missouri Review, TheNew York Times, and otherliterary magazines.