IN PERSON - Joshua Burton - GRACE ENGINE

Brazos Bookstore will host Joshua Burton in person on Tuesday, March 21 at 6:30pm.

Joshua Burton will be in conversation with Chankrisna Tea

“Words carry the dead like henchmen” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary collection. 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 in Grace Engine, “I spent  so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”

Experimenting with spaces, absences, and forms—and navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness—Burton seeks 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.

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, Texas, who earned his MFA in poetry from Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar and a 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, and more.

Chankrisna Tea (she/they) is a non-binary Khmer artist from Houston, TX. She is invested in the art of sequences, poetry and comics, and her work can be found in Infrarrealista Review, Sybil, and more.