Blackacre: Poems

by Monica Youn

“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?

Genres: Poetry, Womens, Nonfiction, American

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2016

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good example of concept poems that even if I understand the concept, I don't connect well with them. To me they just don't have a soul.

Monica Youn has a background as a lawyer, and Blackacre is a fictional legal term for hypothetical land. The poems revolve around this idea and others. I felt like to really understand them I would have to dig deeper, but after reading each one twice, I didn't find I wanted to. It's just a preference thing.

I did like the poem "Portrait of a Hanged Woman."

I read this book of poetry because it was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review for the Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...

Most nonlawyers are familiar with the custom of using the names "John Doe" or "Jane Doe" to signify an anonymous party, usually the plaintiff, in a legal action. Fewer people outside the legal profession are aware of the related use of the term "Blackacre" as a placeholder in cases and discussions pertaining to the rights of various parties to a piece of land.

Monica Youn uses the latter to great effect as the title of her third poetry collection, "Blackacre." In this precise, taut, and philosophical hybrid, she examines highly conceptual realms through imagery and syntax that seem magical in their ability to make the abstract concrete in much the same way that these fictitious people and properties do in legal matters.

Other hypothetical estates that might crop up in such cases include Whiteacre, Greenacre, Brownacre, Redacre and Blueacre, and throughout the brilliant central and final sequences of this stunning collection, Youn employs these words, with their obvious poetic as well as legal implications, to explore, among other things, the answer to the question, "But what if a given surface is coaxed into fruitfulness wrongfully?"

Youn is the author of two previous collections, "Barter" and "Ignatz," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also a former lawyer who currently teaches writing at Princeton University and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Here, she draws on her background in law to make leaps into the fields of family, fertility, art, shame, fear and hope.

The book opens with a poem called "Palinode," a piece in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a previous poem. It reads in its entirety,

I was wrong

please I was

wrong please I

wanted nothing please

I don't want.

And Youn does look hard at desire: how it arises, how it is satisfied, and how it recurs.

The desire — and struggle — to have a child, especially, weave in and out of the collection's four sections. In fact, the second section begins with a prose poem called "Desideratum," meaning something that is needed or wanted. Youn fills the subsequent pieces with nature motifs that speak not only to botanical life, but also to the speaker's urge to reproduce herself: "a seed falls // from a bird's / unappeasable body. // A little twirl of air / guides them down the trunk // as if down a glass staircase // (not to a room) / to a landing, // a crevice, / (not a cradle)."

Each poem feels urgent thanks to the tension created by language that is austere yet unsparing, and rhetoric that is restrained yet deeply emotional, as when she writes in "Lamentation of the Hanged Man": "I am always turning // in the same / idiot arcs, // always facing / the horizon's white- // lipped sneer." Her intelligence feels extensive and inviting, particularly thanks to the sources from which she draws her epigraphs, ranging from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" to a snopes.com report on Twinkies.

In a thoughtful piece about the sequence for the Poetry Foundation, Youn writes, "I think of each '____acre' as a landscape, a legacy — the allotment each of us is given to work with, whether that allotment is a place, a span of time, a work of art, a body, a destiny. … What are the limits of the imagination's ability to transform what is given?"

Her imagination proves itself immensely transformative, recounting her considerations and reconsiderations, as when she writes, unexpectedly but aptly comparing her speaker's experiences of barrenness to John Milton's experiences of blindness, "My mistake was similar. I came to consider my body — its tug-of-war of tautnesses and slacknesses — to be entirely my own, an appliance for generating various textures and temperatures of friction."

Aside from Wallace Stevens, who graduated from New York Law School in 1903 and went on to work as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and a handful of other examples, such as Reginald Dwayne Betts, there's not a strong association between poets and the law. Youn's Blackacre stands as a gorgeous and intellectually scintillating addition to this esoteric and necessary tradition.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blackacres are the legal stand-ins for land that is, for example, being bequeathed. It is the land equivalent of John or Jane Doe. In this volume, the land stands in for images of love and loss and what we can, cannot, or perhaps expect from life.

The first section of this volume is modeled on Francois Villon's Ballad of the Hanged. It is vivid, disconcerting, haunting, and beautiful.

This is a work that definitely cries out to be read again and again. I'm already on my second reading and discovering so much more than I gleaned from my first reading. The poems are dense and lovely.

[Sara Sams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blackacre astounded me in ways poetry rarely does, and confounded me in new ways, too. I'd expect nothing less, since Monica Youn is an incredible poet.

I need to stew on this for awhile, and probably read it again.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some high-faluntin' stuff, including multiple takes on a John Milton sonnet. If Milton's over my head, riffs on Milton have to hold some altitude as well. Also a collection of poems dealing with color. Blackacre, Whiteacre, Redacre, Blueacre, One fish, two fish, well-read (she teaches at Princeton) fish, blue fish. It so happens I liked "Greenacre" best. And no, nothing to do with Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Just a boy and a girl in a greenish pond up to God knows what.

Youn has an impressive vocabulary. Of course impressive vocabularies, thick as thieves in poems, cut both ways if you can't grasp what in hell's going on. Still, there were moments. There were turns of phrase. And I kept going.

So mixed blessings here, and a challenge for any academic sorts who like a little Ivy League grad school with their morning poetry.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

BLACKACRE

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 it had already
launched itself into the gray sky like an escape
capsule accidentally empty sent spiraling into the
unpeopled galaxies of my trackless gray body

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this collection! Youn is so smart and I love how each section has a different focus/form and yet each section speaks to the others in a way I can't fully articulate. I felt humbled in the presence of this book, and awed at the same time. I can't wait to read it again. Marvelous and rich, its gifts.

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Youn gives us high stakes poems, weaving through law and lawlessness. She presents the highs and lows of so-called civilization, never flinching.

Postcard review: http://ow.ly/y7CS302T0fK

[dc · Rating 5 out of 5]

i had to read each poem 2 or 3 times to get cultivated enough to begin to understand them. youn is now an adjective for me. a synonym might be "full of light" or "mega" or, even, "untouchable."

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm happy to have read it, and ultimately think either I've been a bit too disfocused this week to give it proper thought or that it thinks a bit much on the page for me. Either way, I know that this has merit for an audience out there and perhaps I simply was not particularly the intended one. :D

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

The great sycamore among the great stand of like trees sways in the wind and I am driven pell-mell

through these woods and am flung into a creek bed and deposited so in New York’s wild, brooding land

and it is dry and I lie unmoving and staring at the flat sky that beautifully disguises itself in its broad

ever spreading conspiratorial way and I am absent at the present moment to heap further adjectives...

Wait.

Place is a concrete thing, slippery for blood, nothing more.

Chris Roberts, Ascendent

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm pretty much the target demographic for this poetry collection, particularly the Blackacre movement, and more than enjoying it or appreciating it, I needed it.

[J · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the kind of poetry that makes me think I don't like poetry. It is verbose to the point that it becomes unreadable.

[Melissa Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started to read this book in the hospital, one day after giving birth to my daughter. I read the poems aloud to her as she nodded off on my chest and my husband slept on the plastic couch in the corner. The poems are fearless in many ways: they are political and thematic without being obvious, they are precise but also expansive -- they have enough room to walk around inside of them. The best ones sound great and are absolute stunners when read aloud: "I bequeath this mean estate / to whoever hungers to taste this marbled meat, / who--having eaten, sated for once--may rest. / This oubliette I once named Little-Ease / now teems with eager tenants: an ants-nest."

Here are some other favorite lines:

-"They drifted whitely upward like seed floss releasing from summer trees." (18)
-"Imagine it dialed back to featurelessness, each spiraling stalk erected, each filigree rosette slow-blinking shut." (41)
-"the mountains arrayed in a semicircle around us, / all expectant angles, like the music stands // of an absent orchestra" (59)
-"an inky stain // bluer than blushing, / truer than trusting" (61)
-"The page scoured white by little grains of fear." (73)
-"Then one day the fear reversed itself. Like a photo negative but in higher contrast--its whites more glaring and its darks more glossy, as if a whisper-thin suspicion had come unzipped." (73)
-"'Prevent'--a word like a white sheet folded back to cover the mouth." (75)
-"at what point does this white lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, opacity, obstacle--the ice disc clogging the round pond, the grid of proteins baffling the eye?" (75)
-"Milton's blindness, a white monologue that admits neither interruption nor rejoinder. // Milton's little murmur stitched back into his mouth." (76)
-"their branchings barbed like fluffs" (79)
-"the lacerated land bandaged in snow" (81)
-"To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip." (81)
-"mercy seals the join with tar and tape" (81)
-"To foster the raw scion as if it were a son; to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own." (81)

(The last poem is pretty much just perfect!)

[Jack Lyell · Rating 4 out of 5]

[11/166]


It’s hard to do a singular response to Blackacre, whose power as a collection in part derives from its incredible versatility, both in style and in subject. Sparse lines of bizarre, beautiful imagery accompany an almost thesis-like piece on one of Milton’s sonnets, examining each verb with careful attention. Subjects range from the Biblical to Snopes articles on Twinkies to childhood to fireflies. (The Twinkie poem is also a powerful comment on race.) Youn twists meaning in poetic flights of fantasy that soak up all the connotations of subject and turn them back in on themselves, focusing specifically on female agency and the womb. Greenacre, for instance, is filled with imagery of “puncturing land” and asks what happens to a “given surface coaxed into fruitfulness wrongfully” (30), a transparent nod to rape. Many of the -acre poems explore similar subtext. Common, too, is subtext of powerlessness or desperation, such as the opening poem Palinode, which speaks of a bird unable to fly, dreading the drop. The accompanying second part is a desperate cry from an unknown speaker, assumed to be the bird. Like many of the poems, it at first feels like a total change of topic from the first, weaving back into the emotional core of the pieces to create a collection whose connectivity surges through subtexts. Portrait of A Hanged Woman and the speaker of the first Blackacre, who has lost a child, speak explicitly to female trauma, especially in situations where agency is difficult to maintain over one’s identity or one’s body.

[Jonas Adam Stargazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a violence lurking in Monica Youn’s Blackacre, out in the shade of an old, abandoned field and waiting to be discovered. The poems cover an uncanny formal and linguistic breadth, yet having that breadth, it manages to be the most cohesive collection I’ve read in months. The first eleven poems as a section each interrogate a different part of the image of hanging, forming a mythic archetype for hanged bodies, hanged persons, and the trees that bear their weight. The geography of unreality: “This is neither landscape nor memory, this is parable.” When the final sections iterate through color senses and land bequeathment, the hanged bodies remain. Maybe Judas and the Field of Blood. Maybe lynchings – Blackacre referred to the forty acres requisitioned to freed slaves after the Civil War. Death is here where it shouldn’t be; the violence and appropriation of the legal system on trial. What language does the land have for its own memory? The final “Blackacre” as an essay-sonnet after Milton’s Sonnet 19 suggests a duty to harsh memories – the poet’s own and the land’s. There is no space and time; time is everywhere. Even “Against Imagism” with the chaotic nihilism of the SHAZAM bug zapper stands as a testament to the cruel irony and persistent violence of ownership.

[Elijah Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another collection I was driven to read by “Raised by Wolves,” which featured Youn’s poem “Hangman’s Tree,” a standout in “Blackacre.”

Youn’s background as a lawyer is clear in her writing. She subordinates tortuously, carving painstaking relationships into poems that are either hallucinatory and rich or spare and inquisitive.

Youn’s poems aren’t understood so much as felt, like a “Touch If You Dare” box at an elementary school Halloween party. You put your hand in, grasp around, take your best guess. Sometimes a later poem reveals just how far off you were.

It’s hard for me to enjoy a collection that feels so inhospitable to understanding (because I pride myself in being able to understand things). But I also find endless value, when I move past this discomfort, in brushing up against ways of knowing that are not contingent on understanding. What do we learn when we deliberately avoid interrogating why something has happened, instead focusing on the experience of it happening:

“If only
I were lying still,

pressed to the ground,
I might be taken

for part of the earth
tilled into the soil

like any other
enrichment, like labor.”

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Necessity
is not a weaver,
there is no spindle

in her hand;
it is a woman
wearing a steel

collar, wearing
a stiffly pleated
dress, which lifts

to reveal nothing
but fabric where
her body used to be.

This book did nothing for me the first time I read it. Once I was forced into the ridiculous routine of having to crap out a four-page response and had to re-read the poems I marked (plus some interviews for extra context), I realized that this was actually pretty good. I did love Youn's poetry because it was so familiar, even if the language at times made it inaccessible. It doesn't mean that it isn't easy to read, it's just hard to understand at times. Nevertheless, Youn is the queen of imagery. Most of my post-it notes are just me squeeing about how beautiful a turn of phrase was.

[Will Quabbit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like everyone else, I read this book because it got longlisted so I obediently picked up a copy to expose myself to quality poetry. The poems here are a mix of allusively lyrical and analytic, the latter coming up most prominently in the extended line-by-line "riff" on Milton's famous sonnet. I liked this combination and the deep dive into Milton's blindness as a metaphor for the author's inability to have children. The objective quality contrasted with the personal topic is what creates poignancy.

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

These were excellent poems, not least because they rebel against Poet Voice. They find an interesting balance between cerebral and visceral. The result is both thought-provoking and a bit unsettling.

I did kind of skip the one about the Jack Nicholson movie.

The last poem, "Blackacre," is a great prose poem.

I'm glad I read it.

[Kai Metcalfe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly just didn't really get this book. I struggled with almost every poem. I'm wondering if a second read through would help but I didn't even like it enough to commit to that right now. I liked how the words felt to read, I learned some new words, but nothing resonated or left me with thoughts to chew on. Probably because my brain couldn't make sense on the words to begin with.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection. The poems were so varied and worked for me in a lot of different ways - subject matter, pure auditory enjoyment, visual appeasement. I certainly wasn't familiar with many of the literary references but that didn't hinder my enjoyment.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly the first such collection of poetry I've read (sort of a random rec from a friend who went to school with the author) but it was generally pretty enjoyable. I'm not quite sure what to make of it overall.

[judy-b. judy-b. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another collection of deeply intellectual poetry, this time with a little more emotion that I felt (or let myself feel) in Ignatz. I often had the feeling of being inside Youn's mind as she looked out on landscapes, people, and art.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ending sequence, riffing on Milton's blindness sonnet, is astonishing, but the middle section felt more diffuse, perhaps not totally finished.

[marcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's just not for me

[Miranda Tsang · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZIN

[Matthew Murawski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't do much for me. Formally not super interesting, and very abstract.

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow!! wow!!! WOW!!!

[(Mellifluous Grant) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ms Young uses an impressive vocabulary in her poetry the does much to enhance your visual understanding...well done.