Shade is a place

About Shade is a place

From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a lyrical debut that explores the social and ecological relief trees can provide within the entanglements of place, property, urban planning, and racial terror in Charlottesville, Virginia

Shade is a place meanders east–west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking “a Black sense of place” at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural history, and the speaker’s ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one’s attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems (“tree walks” and “shade walks”) and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one’s inner life—sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.