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.

MaKshya Tolbert serves as the chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission and as the guest curator for the New City Arts Fellowship. A graduate of the University of Virginia's Creative Writing MFA program, Tolbert is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from Community of Writers, Tin House, and Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc. with work in the Kenyon Review and Tupelo Quarterly, among other outlets. In free moments, Tolbert is elsewhere—a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.”