Shade is a place
MaKshya Tolbert
Paperback
October 7, 2025 | ISBN 9780143138457
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Ebook
October 7, 2025 | ISBN 9780593512524
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About the Book
From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, comes a lyrical debut that explores the social and ecological relief trees can provide within the entanglements of place, property, urban planning, and racial terror 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 inner life and ongoing questions. 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 Bashō-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.
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 inner life and ongoing questions. 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 Bashō-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.
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