Shade is a place

(Paperback)

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From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a "startlingly original debut" (Maggie Millner) that meanders toward possibilities of arboreal relief among entanglements of place, property, and urban planning in Charlottesville, Virginia From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a "startlingly original debut" (Maggie Millner) that meanders toward possibilities of arboreal relief among entanglements of place, property, and urban planning 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 Basho-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.

Reviews

Advance Praise for Shade is a place:

Shade is a place consciously extends the American tradition of documentary poetics, plaited here with a Black feminist, ecopoetic vision distinctly Tolberts own. Tell the trees Im 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

Author Bio

MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Shade is a place is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere-a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls "that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe."