UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Poems

Rebecca Black

Winner of the 2004 Juniper Prize for Poetry

The poems in Rebecca Black's first volume, Cottonlandia, move through myth and landscape, beginning in the deep South's "shimmer and tar" and ending in the "soot and orange dolor" of the California desert. Cottonlandia conjures a proto-continent where fashionable golems pose for antique photographs and nineteenth-century naturalists wander into the melee of the civil rights struggle in the South.

By turns haunting and comic, Black's poems describe the archaeology of the apocalypse. Countesses leave behind poisonous snapshots, lovers examine their shapes in the mirror, and Seminoles return for skeletons arranged illegally in exhibits, even as floods force antebellum coffins to rise.

In the title poem, reproduced on this page, the lines of a spiritual splinter and circle through a loose narrative, evoking the delirium of class and race in the author's Georgia hometown. Throughout the volume, poems quarrel with primal forces, threading the needle of historical oblivion with a dark, intelligent, and incantatory voice.

"It is rare to encounter a first collection that possesses the confidence and breadth of Rebecca Black's Cottonlandia. Black displays an elegant lyric concision and above all an abiding historical awareness, one refreshingly untainted by sensationalism or breezy ironies. Her reckonings, her 'sweet transmigrations,' manage to be personal and communal at once; this is the work of a poet of unusual promise."

David Wojahn

"With her debut, Rebecca Black's work strides among us, all confidence and grace. Whether considering family history or the history of the cotton gin, Cottonlandia stuns with poems that invent, inventory, and interrogate the American South of her childhood, and its legacy of segregation and song. Black's is a voice full of other voices, from tough-girl Mephista to tender prayer; hers is a poetry full of promise and pain, migrating from Otis Redding to nanotechnology. Cottonlandia is a book steeped in the past, but whose time is now."

Kevin Young

	Rebecca Black teaches literature and writing at Santa Clara University. She received a B.A. from Tulane University and an M.F.A. from Indiana University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, Missouri Review, and other journals.
Courtesy of Michael Rauner Photography.

Poetry
80 pp.
$14.95t paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-491-6
June 2005

Cottonlandia

Little wheel
something gnarls in the blood
in our Arcadia of mayflies.

We make wine from muscadines,
little wheel turning inside my heart.
In January after the crop

floats to Apalachee
other cargo arrives—old men
boot-blacked before the auction block.

Shawl of cassimere, calamus-
root, one small revolver
on offer at Muse & Co.

Little wheel turning, gossypium
grows gossypium grows
along the roads.

Cotton alone does not spin
into cloth____the bridge itself
does not burn____little wheel

turning inside my heart
what's been must be storied
grist mill____cotton gin

what's invented____inventoried

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