Blackacre

*Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award* *National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist* *Included in The New York Times Best Poetry of 2016* *Named one of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2016* * Longlisted for the National Book Award* "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...
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*Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award*
*National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist*
*Included in The New York Times Best Poetry of 2016*
*Named one of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2016*
* Longlisted for the National Book Award*


"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?