Made to Explode

Made to Explode [300 dpi JPG]W.W. Norton & Company ~ Hardback, February 2021

Hardback ISBN-10: 0393531600 / ISBN-13: 978-0393531602

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*** February selection for the Politics & Prose Signed First Editions Book Club ***

*** Finalist, Library of Virginia’s 25th Annual Literary Awards (Poetry Category) ***

*** Winner, Housatonic Book Award ***

 

“A rare and vibrant exploration of whiteness and complicity when it comes to America’s history and traditions, Made to Explode is a courageous interrogation of self, culture, and how we are made. Both unflinching and tender, Beasley’s smart and radiant poems glow with a historian’s exactitude and a poet’s lyrical heart.”

~ Ada Limón

“I know I am reading a Sandra Beasley poem when precision and music are driven by emotive, passionate force…But what I most recommend, and what I am most compelled by in these pages is their engagement with American history. ‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits in the nineteenth row of my heart,’ writes Beasley in what, in the end, becomes a book of reckoning. Beasley questions the late empire, yes, but perhaps more importantly, more honestly: she questions herself. Which is why, I think, this is a most beautiful book: you will find virtuoso music, and necessary clarity.”

~Ilya Kaminsky

“Made to Explode makes no attempt whatsoever to fight shy of dazzling and rafter-rattling detonation. Here the poet, known for her smooth mastery of craft and lyric, examines a life lived in and around the capital of her fractured and restless country. She aims unerringly at the contradictions of lush, picture-book days in Virginia, and later DC, with its paradoxes, its stern testaments, its stone institutions. In the process, she redefines her own root. There is unwavering insight in these poems. There is tenderness and personal revelation. There is everything we waited for.”

~Patricia Smith

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From Publisher’s Weekly:

The vibrant fourth collection from Beasley (Count the Waves) offers a litany of sensual pleasures and careful self-reckoning. Playful considerations of peaches, fried fish, grits, and other foods serve the poet to wide-ranging ends. Imagining the painter Marc Chagall transplanted from Belarus to Biloxi, the poet rhapsodizes about the silver fish native to the Gulf: “holy mullet would/ ring over his rooftops—// mullet, on violin—rooster/ and mullet, mullet and goat,” and muses, “how one// can scavenge the bottom/ and still rise, without apology,/ by the silvered dozen.” A series of ekphrastic prose poems at the book’s center describe national monuments, relying on their less than subtle ironies. On Roosevelt’s memorial: “This sculpted wall is supposed to speak of WPA, CCC, the alphabet agencies. But its Braille dots are oversized beyond any one fingertip. This is gibberish, a visitor says, feeling the spaces between.” Throughout the book, the poet contends with the pain of coming to terms with her Southern white heritage. A poem about whiteness, in which “my performative strip of self/ still trash[es] up the place,” ends with an ancestral invocation: “Virginia, my ghosts/ need gathering./ Come to the table/ and sit, goddamit. Sit.” Beasley uses her trademark humor and wit to explore the heavier parts of personal and national identity in this energetic and varied outing. (Feb.)

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From The Washington Post‘s Book World “Book Club” newsletter:

“Washington-area poet Sandra Beasley has just published her fourth collection, Made to Explode. The poems range from interrogations of our racist past to the challenges of living with severe allergies (essay). But even when she considers pedestrian things — like an old card table — Beasley can evoke the poignant complications of life. ” ~Ron Charles

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From Boog City:

“Sandra Beasley’s latest book, Made to Explode, is a vital force for understanding humanity during these times of unrest. In the landscapes of Washington, D.C., as well as rural pockets of America, Beasley guides readers through monuments and franchises by gathering you in a language that cradles, like comfort food and a good friend who nudges you to reflect, and then allows you to awaken to a new understanding in a way that is insistent, complex, and satiating. ” ~Bevil Townsend

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From EcoTheo:

“Beasley’s Made to Explode is brilliantly American—from the soundscapes, the landscapes, and the foodscapes it explores. It has a historical fish-eye, and bends time and space in its lucid attention….You will not find a clearer or brighter voice for speaking to the intricacies of heirlooms and heritage[.]” ~Han VanderHart

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From Rhino Poetry:

“This is a collection in which many histories converge to explore moments and monuments, each one embedded with something flammable, something whose power we don’t know until it ignites. Sometimes this ignition burns away to reveal great tenderness and love, and sometimes it peels back the surface to expose a hidden truth, an untold story. Using humor, storytelling, research, personal narrative, and political commentary, Beasley tackles elegy, privilege, disability, and coming to terms with a past embedded with shrapnel, providing a portrait of our time that is deeply personal, historically thought-provoking, and firmly rooted in the modern American zeitgeist.” ~Donna Vorreyer

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From Wraparound South:

“This collection of poems stands apart while looking head-on at the identity crisis of our current politics. But she does so without virtue-signaling and self-righteous cliches that so many other poets are guilty of when they attempt to wrap words around the tragedies we both are culpable for, and bystanders in, at the same time…Stories of food fill these pages, braced against what it means to be an American. What ordinary people experience in simple joy, and in vital reckoning.” ~Danèlle Lejeune

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From Scene4:

“With Made to Explode [Beasley] has presented us with what will be one of the year’s essential poetry collections but also a book that one will return to many times to discover new pleasures and thought-provoking writing.” ~Gregory Luce

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From Savvy Verse and Wit:

“Each poem in the collection builds onto the next in a crescendo of unraveling histories, culture lost to a country burying it’s own truth, until a reckoning is all that can be left.” ~Serena Agusto-Cox

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From Kenyon Review Online:

“Beasley’s collection explores space, time, and history in poems that illuminate truth while casting shade on what people are taught about a past of which Americans cannot always be proud. Her poems enlighten and expose, reveal and chastise.” ~Anne Graue

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From The Indianapolis Review:

“Beasley’s fourth collection of poems explores these often wrought, familial, and political heritages that are the golden thread that runs through the fabric of all Americans..” ~Amanda Auchter

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