Blackacre

by Monica Youn

Overview

*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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977504
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	234,496
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Monica Youn is the author of two previous poetry collections, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2016
This third collection from Youn (Ignatz) finds her tightly yet playfully interrogating inheritance and legacy, real and fictional landscapes, and the particular bodily experience of a woman hoping to conceive. The title refers to a legal term denoting a type of fictional entity, a hypothetical real estate; Youn’s legal background (she was a practicing lawyer for years) emerges in her attention to detail and ability to parse concepts. Formally and syntactically diverse, the poems often portray a mature, professional woman wrestling with the philosophy and psychology of all that that life entails. Word play abounds (“a statement// of intent, of well-meant/ amends; an acquiescent an-/ athema in its seam-/ less unseen net”), as do references to working life and an intellectualized distancing when dealing with corporeality (“one day they showed me a dark moon ringed/ with a bright nimbus on a swirling gray screen/ they called it my last chance for neverending life/ but the next day it was gone”). Throughout, Youn’s lawyerly analyses—of life, of herself, her feelings, and of language—cut through the poetic to a place that lies triangulated between poetry, lyric memoir, and textual analysis. It is in that latter element that Youn deconstructs the nature of possession and boundedness; in the act of self-claiming, Youn wonders, did she make herself “into a resource that was bounded, and, therefore, exhaustible?” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

[Monica Youn is] one of the most consistently innovative poets working today. . . . Youn mines [open questions] with precise skill as she circles ideas of barrenness and fertility. . . . Youn's poems, luminous fictions, also capture the sheer force of imagining the self.”—Tess Taylor, NPR “All Things Considered”

“Youn reminds readers that poetry is essential because of how it says what can’t be expressed through prose.”—The Washington Post

"Each poem feels urgent thanks to the tension created by language that is austere yet unsparing, and rhetoric that is restrained yet deeply emotional. . . . [Youn’s] intelligence feels extensive and inviting. . . . Blackacre stands as a gorgeous and intellectually scintillating addition to this esoteric and necessary tradition.”—Chicago Tribune

“Youn is technically innovative, easily moving from unusual numbered one-line stanzas, to prose poems, to staggered lines, to lines in columns that defy traditional reading. . . . Youn makes us realize that our longings and disappointments are captured in the images of our lives—both the immediate and the recollected.”—Houston Chronicle

“Blackacre is a visit to an in-between, liminal world, with much to think about while we are there.”—American Poet

“[Blackacre] explores everything from racial identity to intfertility, and dives deep into experiences of both wanting and not-wanting. . . . It’s grim, bleak, and haunting writing, and also beautiful.”—Bustle

“Monica Youn sends into the world a Renaissance woman’s exhibition on the unnerving ways we absorb and resist the whiplash of want snapping in our bellies.”—The Critical Flame

“Blackacre is practically a handbook on poetics. . . . There are many standout poems in this dazzling collection. . . . In every generation there is a handful of poets who challenge the way we think about language and how it is used. . . . It is to this distinguished company that Youn now belongs.”—Hyperallergic

“The poems in Blackacre are utterly gorgeous. Monica Youn’s voice is nimble and vivid, with the poetic sensibility to fit a planet through a needle-eye. . . . The poems in this book contain a restless lyric energy, whilst maintaining cool narrative composure.”—Librairie Drawn & Quarterly

“Blackacre is a marvel to read. . . . These poems are exceptional in their form and content as Youn shapes words into objects of clairvoyant beauty.”—The Journal (West Virginia)

“Monica Youn layers her poems with meaning as well as with references that span millennia: from Greek and Norse mythology, to poets like Francois Villon and John Milton, to films like The Passenger. Youn’s haunting poems rewrite and reanimate a landscape that is ultimately entirely her own.”—Fork & Page

“[Youn] tightly yet playfully interrogat[es] inheritance and legacy, real and fictional landscapes, and the particular bodily experience of a woman hoping to conceive. . . . Youn's lawyerly analyses—of life, of herself, her feelings, and of language—cut through the poetic to a place that lies between poetry, lyric memoir, and textual analysis.”—Publishers Weekly

“Every year it happens that I'm excited about too many new books. . . . National Book Award finalist Monica Youn brings out her third collection, Blackacre, which wrestles with the legal implications of places.”—Craig Teicher, NPR

“Monica Youn, quite simply, is one of the two or three most brilliant poets working in America today. In these revelatory poems, the reader encounters an exhilarating thinking-through of all that lyric form entails. No one can match her for impeccable distillation; we knew that before. But in Blackacre, we also encounter a more expansive, undefended version of the poet than any of her previous work had led us to expect. This book is a marvel; read it and read it again.”—Linda Gregerson

"Blackacre is virtuosic: poems so sharp and fine they cut deep past the body or the self or the mind—they're needles of rain carving out a canyon. Death is as close as birth, and as far. Youn dazzles with her enigmatic loopholes—the taut noose, the elusive umbilicus, the Möbius qualities of longing and lack and love—which shadow or shape who we are, and what can be called ours.”—Brenda Shaughnessy

“In Monica Youn's remarkable series of poems, words and objects are alike subjected to a probing intelligence that is at once philosophical and psychological. The precision of observation at every level is almost overwhelming. The reader cannot relax for an instant, nor does she want to because the unfolding thought, wire tight and tactile as well as conceptual, is so compelling and demanding of a complete attention that is more than rewarded.”—Stanley Fish

From the Publisher

08/01/2016
Just as John Milton reflected on his blindness in his sonnet, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent," Youn reflects on her barrenness in her latest book of poetry. The author of two previous collections, Barter and Ignatz, a finalist for the National Book Award, Youn is a lawyer-turned-poet/writing professor. This book takes an almost childlike delight in wordplay as it blends autobiography with images from nature as well as allusions to Tarot cards, biblical passages, and works by Milton, e.e. cummings, Virginia Woolf, and others. The title comes from the law school concept of "blackacre," a legal fiction meaning a hypothetical estate just as John Doe is a hypothetical name. Youn bases many of the poems on this concept calling them "Whiteacre," "Greenacre," "Brownacre," etc. The title poem—heavy with allusions to Milton's sonnet—is a lengthy prose poem about her inability to bear a child and her subsequent efforts to conceive using in vitro fertilization. VERDICT Ultimately, this collection contains a somewhat uneasy though generally pleasing mix of references and styles ranging from minimalist, Zenlike offerings to free verse to full-throated prose poems. Sophisticated readers should investigate.—C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Library Journal