Poets Tiana Clark, Kerri French, Kory Wells, and Ciona Rouse at the 2015 Southern Festival of Books.
If you’re in the poetry world, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Tiana Clark, prize-winning author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood and Equilibrium. Along with numerous poets from middle Tennessee and beyond, Tiana and I share the same “poetry father” – the wondrous Bill Brown, most recently author of The Cairns and a model of generosity and attention.
In the past couple of years, Tiana’s career has skyrocketed. Y’all, when she reads in Nashville, HUNDREDS of people show up. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a big score for her AND for poetry in general. With her immense popularity, I’m especially grateful (if not downright amazed) that she made the time to blurb Sugar Fix.
A 2019 NEA fellow who’s been included in Poets & Writers‘ annual feature on debut poets, Tiana is also an essayist on topics ranging from the new Apple TV Plus series “Dickinson” in the Washington Post to an engrossing examination of history, place, and identity in her Oxford American piece “Nina Is Everywhere I Go,” in which she says:
I have conversations with the dead, especially dead Black women. By doing so, I locate my story and myself within the past.
This sentence points to one way that Tiana’s work, workshops, and social media conversations have been so helpful to my own writing about the past and race, as you can read more about here. The entire essay points toward being intentional and going deep, deep, deep into the questions and assumptions concerning your own writing and writing style.
Tiana also often explores the intersection of the sacred and the sexual – another writing obsession we share. While her best known poem may be “Nashville” in The New Yorker, my personal favorite is “A Psalm for the One” in The Adroit Journal. I love the language of this poem and how [SPOILER ALERT] the threefold amen, well into the poem, is at once a surprise and also a perfectly timed device that emphasizes the rhythm of a divine service.
Discover more of Tiana’s work here on her website.
Thank you for this lovely shout-out, Kory!