Personalize Your Library Experience

When you choose your preferred branches and age groups, the site will automatically filter the content to match your selections.

Select Your Branches

Select Your Age Groups

This information will be saved as a cookie, and cannot be connected to a library login or transferred between computers

icon of stars; highlighting that you can open the select favorite branch overlay Save & Close
Return to All Blog Posts
Back to Top

National Poetry Month: Tennison S. Black

About Blog Post Apr 17, 2024 by SCLSNJ Staff
National Poetry Month: Tennison S. Black   Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian Our National Poetry Month poet for today is Tennison S. Black. Black’s debut collection, "Survival Strategies," was published in September by the University of Georgia Press. From the publisher’s description: "'Survival Strategies' is a love story wrapped in a reckoning. Arranged in three parts, this collection of poems follows a narrative arc.The speaker, who is returning to the Sonoran of her birth after many years away, takes us with her on a journey of enlightenment." The collection was one of the five winners of the 2022 National Poetry Series, a prestigious literary award designed to promote emerging poets. It was selected by the poet Adrienne Su, who said of the collection: "The Sonoran desert, invoked through saguaros, scorpions, jackrabbits, coyotes, and cowboys, is nearly a character in these fierce poems, which chronicle the poet's return to a place that 'has been trying to kill me since I was born.' Recurring images of place, along with a unifying narrative, give ‘Survival Strategies’ the texture of a repeating form on a large scale, as the boundaries between the landscape and one family living in it begin to dissolve...Alive with hard-earned understanding and affirmation, these poems are for everyone who ever tried to leave a formative place of pain but found that person and place could never be fully untwined." Visit the author's website for news, interviews, and more, then check out "Survival Strategies" today!
chat loading...