Grace Engine

by Joshua Burton

“Words carry the dead like henchmen,” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, “I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”

Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.
  I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2023

About the author

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist, and a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is currently out with Ethel and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press.

Reviews

[Charisse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished it in 4 days even though I had tons of stuff to do. I consumed it in bite-sized pieces, a few poems at a time. It brought me to a webbed, dark world where I dwelled on surprising metaphors and juxtapositions as the narrator recounted stories of his own life and that of others, connecting lives and across the years and centuries. I’d need to re-read some of the poems. Tip: if you want to know more about some of the people named in the poems for better context, there is a Notes section at the back.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think one of the questions these poems ask is what grace (and penitence?) mean in a hostile and dangerous world of lynchings, mental illness, self-hate. “Grace does not belong to you,” reminds one poem. And yet the poems give grace nonetheless. What does it mean to give something away that isn’t yours? Perhaps something that can only be given because it isn’t yours? The world of these poems has no solace in it, but the poems reach toward peace and beauty nonetheless.

[Jeneisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And I will plant my hands in the soil
and slide my blood back into my wrist like a stubborn vein
and wait for your nothing"

Joshua explores complex humanness with language that draws you in with each word. Shame, guilt, accountability, forgiveness, awareness, unlearning ... This collection hones in deeply to each of these elements beautifully. Phenomenal storytelling. I recommend this work for all that are seeking to be sound with the soul.

[devon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really my vibe. A lot of incorporation of religion and religious questioning. I did enjoy a good amount of poems though and thought there was a lot of stylistic/formatting choices that were creative and intriguing. Just don’t really like most poetry

[K. Iver · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books this year. In many poems Joshua builds tender and life-affirming worlds for people who were lynched. I'll never think of the word "grace" the same.

[Tasha Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book

[Joyce Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!