Scorched Earth: Poems

by Tiana Clark

The striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the “beautiful, vulnerable, honest” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author) I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.

Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.

From a generational voice that “earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve Ewing, Nicole Sealy, and Airea D. Matthews” (Booklist, starred review), Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Nonfiction, Adult, Audiobook, American

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2025

About the author

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies.

Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Her second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, which moves between ruins and radical love will be published March 4, 2025. Clark is currently working on a memoir-in-essays, Begging to be Saved, reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and exploring historical methods of Black survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely magnificent collection of poetry. Clark has a really deft hand with poetic forms. I especially enjoyed the emotional tenor of the poems, the sensual imagery, the voice.

[Amy Imogene Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Review to come!

[Ditte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before Scorched Earth, I'd been thinking maybe modern poetry wasn't my thing but this collection by Tiana Clark may just have changed my mind.

Clark plays with form and structure in a way that makes clear she knows what she's doing which feels fresh and interesting, like how the collection's both lyrical and uses modern, easy-to-understand language. All this while laying bare her doubts, pains, and vulnerabilities makes for a powerful and beautiful read.

Themes in the book mainly center on Clark's divorce, her body, and her queerness, and while most of the poems invoke a sadness, there's also definite joy and hope, especially in the latter parts.

My favourite poem's probably Broken Ode for the Epigraph which has passages too long to quote here but I'm adding some other quotes I loved:

"I want the fire to smell a type of threat
in me and back away. I want the fire
to know I was already consumed,
burned inside my belonging."

- from The First Black Bachelorette


"But I still want joy at the end.
I still want to risk joy at the end.
I still want the repetition of joy at the end."

- from 'Indeed Hotter for Me Are the Joys of the Lord'


"So what if I knew the stress would shatter me. I wanted
to live, even if briefly. So what, I tried ruin for once."

- from Annealing


"Maybe in another life you get to live out all the lives you' ve imagined. Maybe in this life

I become who I am by not knowing—"

- from Maybe in Another Life

[Traci Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this collection it covers a lot of ground. No one poem stuck with me, but a lot of the writing is thoughtful and enjoyable. I liked how themes carried over throughout the book, and I liked how she was thinking about writing and poetry as a subject in her poems that were not actually about that at all.

[Gabi D'Esposito · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

What a gorgeous collection of deeply personal poetry. Each entry was moving and focused. Clark’s writing is somehow both lyrical/flowery and grounded/understandable.

This title is set to release March 4, 2025. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are absolutely stunning! I’m usually a fan of shorter poems, but the long poems in this collection completely kept my interest and more than earned their word count. I look forward to reading more from this author!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are powerful and slightly dark, real observations on life. The author talks plainly about inner anxieties and lost moments. Each one of these poems sound appropriate to chose for a book-reading somewhere, or at a poetry night at a club.

The collection is divided into four parts. The poems in part one each feel like a short-short-story. I liked "My Therapist Want to Know about My Relationship to Work"

I see your face, your phone-lit
faces. I tap your food two times
for more hearts. I retweet.
I email: yes & yes & yes.
Then I cry & need to say: no-no-no.
Why does it take so long to reply?
I FOMO & shout. I read. I never
enough. New book. New Post.
New ping A new tab, then another.

Another, "After the Reading" is a rambling paragraph of individual thought that arose as the author had finished doing a reading somewhere, and received lots of random comments from people that came up to meet her. I liked this interesting list.

Part 2 of this book starts with a 12-page poem that I found lines I constantly wanted to underline (but this was a library book copy)

I've always wondered
what made a slave beautiful
enough to be raped.
What about the body
made it worth it
to commit a sin
on what they deemed
a damned body.

I am realizing as I write this review that the poems just keep getting better and better as this collections goes onward. Each one of these is a mini bio/story, as I hear her personal reflection on a slice of life. I feel I need to file this on my biography and short-story bookshelf too.

Very solid 5*
I will have to check this out from the library again, and/or buy a copy. But someone is waiting for this copy to be returned, or else I'd start at the beginning again (as not that I'm inside her head, I think I'd gain more).

[alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

happy pub day to this absolute beauty!

i’m incredibly, embarrassingly, picky when it comes to poetry. i adore poetry, but only when it truly strikes me at my core and silences my mind, overtaking anything else going on up there (not much, usually).

this collection was breathtaking, full stop. poems about bodies—what it means to live in a body. a Black body. a queer body. a female body. to live in a body that respect is not outright given to, a body that doesn’t always receive respect from it’s inhabitant. to love your body, to love the emotions and feelings that spring from being alive in a body. clark’s writing is both soft & sensitive while full of absolute strength. it encapsulated me from the first page, which i was not prepared for.

tl;dr: tiana clark, you’ve been added to the list of authors whose grocery lists i would read in a heartbeat

(thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review!)

[Ingrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really excellent book of poetry from a real poet's poet. I loved reading poems from someone who's such a scholar of the craft. While I have a bit of pandemic-in-literature/poetry fatigue, Clark's writing is so fresh and singular (and punchy and relatable and moving) that none of it felt too on the nose. And actually, the whole collection felt like meeting a new good friend. Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC, which inspired this review.

[ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a surprise this has been! A very solid poetry collection full of vivid, sensual imagery. It addresses Black pain extensively and yet underneath it is a current of life, pleasure and hope that reaches and holds on to Black joy.

In a way, the poems constitute an archive—of the personal life of the speaker, certainly, but also of historical events and cultural artifacts. I found the extensive references engaging and playful (and anyone who so openly praises Ross Gay not one, but several times, automatically gains points in my book). Lastly, I liked the metalanguage, the self-awareness of the poems as objects—it always makes me think an author has deeply considered their craft and that's something I appreciate as a reader. If I had to pick one favorite poem it would have to be "Broken Ode for the Epigraph", so full of delightful images! I will keep an eye out for Clark's future works.

Thanks to the publisher and Net Galley for sending me an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful and vulnerable, lyrical, poetry collection.
I really enjoyed this one.
I think I need to let this one sink in a bit more before doing a proper review.
These are some really beautiful and honest poems and I will be thinking about them for a while.
Highly recommend.

[Coco Keehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hot damn; this is ELECTRIC POETRY. Full of hungry longing, lust, & living. Explore black hood, womanhood, desire, grief & queerness as Clark takes you through a collection begging to be read out loud. I’m obsessed.

[eris · Rating 3 out of 5]

my main issue with this collection, though i loved several poems, is that it very frustratingly gets in its own way. the first part of the collection is by far its weakest - i nearly stopped reading there - but the next three parts show a decent mastery of language & explore topics in much more depth, with much more empathy and understanding. i say decent & i mean it. the language is an issue in that it interrupts the poems.
clark has a habit of intervening so directly and so jarringly just as the poem is taking off (which is perhaps the point & in that case i’m not the reader for it) with some modern phrase that is out of place or an overused cliché of a metaphor or an unwarranted repetition, and it makes the poem shallow, superficial. the first part, in particular, is a victim of such patterns & it really is a shame, because mostly i felt the poems were going somewhere new until they weren’t.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

brutally honest and unflinching look at divorce, heartbreak, self-worth, and Blackness throughout it all.

the first poem, Proof, is an absolute knockout.

“I wanted / to feel the negotiation of pain besides the present pain”

“Pleasure toggles there / like a whistle of tired skin and juice”

“I want to touch you / like a mirror touches, / everywhere at once.”

[Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

*4.5/5 rounded-up*

Tiana Clark’s collection reads like both a love letter to poetry and a tribute to the poets who have shaped her. Her deep affinity for the art form is evident in the way she masterfully weaves lines and references from her favorite writers throughout the book, creating a kind of living homage. These poems function as an archive not only of the speaker’s personal experiences but also of broader historical moments and cultural touchstones. Clark’s frequent allusions feel both playful and purposeful, inviting the reader into a larger literary conversation. I found these intertextual moments especially engaging, as they enriched the emotional and thematic layers of the work. But what stood out most was the raw honesty that runs through the collection. With vulnerability, Clark explores themes like divorce, Blackness, queerness, self-worth, desire, and shame. Her voice is fresh and deeply resonant, being relatable while still emotionally charged.

Ultimately, there was something about this collection that just really worked for me. It felt at once personal and universal, intellectual and visceral. Clark’s poetry has really moved me and though originally, I was sent an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review I immediately went out to purchase a final copy once it was released because these poems are staying with me!

[Kim Novak (The Reading Rx) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must start by saying that I am not the primary intended audience for this thematic collection of poems. As a single never-married hetero White woman, there were some poems that, while I could appreciate their structure and cadence, I could never fully "get" due to lack of shared experiences. But there was just something about this collection that clicked with me. Oftentimes, I felt like a voyeur on a private therapy session. Other times, I was a fly on the wall during a stream of consciousness talk with oneself. What I appreciated most was the incorporation of pivotal influences in the poet's development, historical references from her collegiate education in Africana and Women's studies, musical influences, and even nature. The dedication to her craft was apparent. These poems felt fresh and unique and unable to be put in a singular box. 

Thank you to Atria Books | Washington Square Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book for my queer divorced hopeful poem-hungry body walking through the new home I purchased myself, doing laundry, scrubbing floors, texting my lover, dreaming up possibilities, remaking my world.

I was halfway through reading the new collection by @tianaclarkypants when I checked online for the audiobook. And what a spectacular addendum to the print book.

Favourite lines of so many favourite lines from the book:

my years frozen as a little girl
who wasn't allowed
to desire other girls
I am choosing to mourn
and celebrate her here
in this long poem
that is my body on the brink
But I still want joy at the end
I still want to risk joy at the end.
I still want the repetition of joy
at the end. And God. And God
at the end is my joy and my body,
maximal joy, and G is joy and G
makes a "Prairie House" for all of us
and all of us are welcome there.
This is where we have our homes now.
Follow me thither and find belonging
and joy. Our joy.

[emma charlton · Rating 5 out of 5]

honest & beautiful! highly recommend.

[Jackie Paiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Atria Books | Washington Square press for providing me a copy of this ARC! Scorched Earth was a visceral, beautiful, and at times tragic collection of poems. While reading I felt teleported back to feeling isolation during COVID, heartbreak following the end of a relationship, and unadulterated desire for love and connection. I loved the ways Clark wove in work from other poets she knows and admires (as we share many of them too). Truly a delight to read!

[Sarwa Azeez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed reading this book. Tiana Clark writes with a remarkable balance of intimacy and craft. Her poems often excavate deeply personal and sensitive subjects — love, loss, race, desire, memory — yet the language never feels heavy-handed or burdened by confession.

[Spencer Reads Everything · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to start with the moment that stopped me cold.
In “The First Black Bachelorette,” Tiana Clark is watching Rachel Lindsay on television. A man reaches for her hair, touches her weave, and Clark wonders what he feels when he feels the tracks. From that single intimate moment, the poem opens outward: through the labor and pain of the salon chair, through what it means to make yourself almost beautiful for an audience, through Zora Neale Hurston and Cardi B and the history of Black survival in America, until the poem arrives at a truth that has been inside it all along. For us, American Blacks, we are postapocalyptic. The end is not near but behind us.
That movement, from the mundane to the radical and back again without flinching, is what Scorched Earth does on nearly every page.
Clark’s second full-length collection begins with divorce. “Proof” opens the book with a diorama made from a shoebox, a recreation of the first kiss with the man who would become her husband and then her ex-husband. The collection then moves through the first day alone in the house, the dog bowl, the California King, the cup of water she presses her lips to because she cannot remember exactly where his mouth had been. These early poems about divorce and mental health are formally extraordinary: one poem renders a panic attack through verbs with no subject, another is a single breathless run-on sentence that crosses out the word “our” on the page itself as if Clark is editing her own life in real time.
But the collection’s real power emerges when it refuses to keep the personal and the political in separate rooms.
“The Hardest Part of the Human Body” begins as a poem about wanting to love her own teeth, that crooked city skyline and lemon-stained swagger. It becomes something else entirely. Clark asks, unflinchingly, what made a slave beautiful enough to be raped, and places that question inside the same poem as wanting her eyebrows microbladed, hiding her gaps when she smiles, and the specific anxieties of being a Black woman moving through spaces designed to make her feel watched. The poem ends with Clark addressing herself in the third person, Oh, Tiana, I want to love you there, and that line carries the weight of everything that has come before it.
“Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” is the collection’s formal centerpiece. The sestina’s six repeating end words are Pleasure, Death, Honeysuckle, Black bodies, Social/Media, and Every day. The poem moves between Clark’s walks through Nashville, the smell of honeysuckle on the greenway, a first date, and the Great Train Wreck of 1918 at Dutchman’s Curve, where 101 people died, the majority of them African Americans segregated into wooden cars at the front of the train. She walked past that site today. She touched the abutments. The formal structure of the sestina makes you feel the repetition itself: how these words keep coming back, how they are never finished with each other, how pleasure and death and every day are always, in this country, rotating through the same body.
Clark is a formally inventive poet, and the range across this collection is remarkable. She writes prose poems of great associative density, compressed lyrics that end with sudden clarity, a broken sonnet in conversation with Flannery O’Connor, an ekphrastic poem addressed to Kara Walker that ends in a three-part declaration so defiant and funny and fierce that you want to read it aloud. She quotes Cardi B in the same breath as Keats. She talks to the reader directly in the second person. She implicates herself in her own poems with a honesty that feels rare and necessary.
I am not a poetry scholar. Some of the longer, more associative poems in this collection asked more of me than I could always give on a first reading. But the poems that landed, and there are many of them, are the kind that do not let you go.
Scorched Earth is, as Clark describes it, a survey of what is on the other side of survival. It is also a blues collection in the truest sense: it keeps the painful details alive, fingers their jagged grain, and squeezes from them a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism that does not resolve the pain but refuses to be consumed by it. I still want joy at the end, Clark writes in the opening poem. That line is the collection’s whole argument. It made me want to read everything she has ever written.

For more of my thoughts, check out my video:
https://youtu.be/lXRs8pKOt0E
For more reviews, check out my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/@SpencerReadsE...

[Lindsey Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This poetry collection is about so much: painful divorce, realizing queer identity, eroticism within that queer identity, celebration of Black beauty and joy, responses to art (like the incredible artist Kara Walker), contemplations of and experimentation with poetic forms, pop culture (reality TV), and transformation/declaration of self.

Clark's voice is bold, confessionary, critical, expansive, imaginative, and probing. She is in full command of her subject matter and form. She somehow manages to both not take herself so seriously and offer wise reflections in seemingly every line. A very strong collection overall, with many standout poems.

I absolutely loved "Broken Ode for the Epigraph," in which Clark interrogates and defines the role of epigraphs in poetry and in life. Here's an excerpt:

O, intertextuality.
O, little foyer to my poem.
O, little , first and foremost.
My amuse-bouche, meaning mouth amuser,
a little glimpse of the meal to come. And sushi:
little epigraphs over rice. And if I could, I would add
an epigraph over everything. Wait . . . who says I can’t?
I’ve always been too much and I am just now beginning
to cherish this too muchness booming late Baroque/
rococo in my chest (little shells of scattered light decorating
the caves in my poems). I wish people came with little epigraphs
tacked on their foreheads, a little foreshadow couldn’t hurt.

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Atria and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available March 2025.

Longing, lust, and libations abound in Tiana Clarke's Scorched Earth. Written in the aftermath of both personal and social upheaval, the poems contend with what is left behind and tries to make sense of residual damage. Travelling as far back as the 18th Century, Clark tackles both personal and historical legacies, grappling with the complexities of living as a Black queer woman in America. I loved the tenderness with which she treated herself, the way she revealed such great vulnerabilities with the reader, the jubilant celebration of so many other authors I hold dear, and the inward progression of the book. Scorched Earth crackles with life!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher for this e-arc!

This was a beautiful and raw poetry collection that touches on grief, religion, heartbreak, and love. I enjoyed how Tiana Clark plays with form in this collection. She doesn't conform to any strict rules for her poems, which I thought helped emphasize the themes that she was writing about. Her imagery is so strong, and her work is in conversation with many other great and important works. This is a collection I will probably re-read because there are so many details and references that I know I'll pick up something different every time.

[Jacquelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Described as crossing borders between “ruined and radical love,” I can say that most of these poems ruined me.

I found myself shocked and drawn in by the pain and the healing Clark must’ve felt in writing them. I found myself lost in the words of growth, both reminding me of my own healing and goals. I found myself learning of experiences other than my own and the Black Joy that radiates from her words.

Absolutely incredible. I already bought a copy for myself.

[Uyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you atria and netgalley for the free ebook.

I'm not sure this was for me.
While I did find some that made me think about what makes someone beautiful or how we look at love or how we decide where or how we belong.

I didn't connect to these poems as much.

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful poems. I love how Clark weaves so many other poets and poems—as well as writers, songs, history, TV shows, etc.—into her poems.

Divorce, racism, coming out, love, freedom, and discovering who you are—these are the main themes here.

[Lianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning in her vulnerability, joy, and pride (the good kind).

[Lisa Muloma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is hard to describe. What a sacrificial feat of self-disclosure from a poet with skill enough to conceal her emotions in beautiful abstraction without any of us knowing better, had she chosen to do that. She breaks form often and veers off what one might expect from Poetry in service of connection, truth. Mary Karr—who wrote “I always thought that poetry's primary purpose was to stir emotion, and that one's delight in dense idiom or syntax or allusion served a secondary one”—would be proud. Many of the poems were a balm, many were an uncomfortable, prodding ember. I don’t cry much but cried often here. Big love to Tiana Clark!

[amy jarvis · Rating 4 out of 5]

deeply beautiful, form-breaking, and resonant