Second Nature

Winner of the 23rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.

Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation.

Through innovative re-imaginings of the sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form and content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain structures of oppression.

Interspersed with quotations and inspired by the rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenoda who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature is a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped by community and country.

Landscape

after William Carlos Williams

Our neighborhood of stolen bikes, backyards, & so

-called conditions of standard living (where nothing was much),

Papa would drive up, reverse, & parallel into his spot like the spot depends

on the smoothness of his return. Wednesdays upon

the red brick column we leaned, porch heavy & lethargic like a

scene to be duplicated the next week. I would eyeball the red

brick weighed between brothers. Brushstroke my hands over the worn flaws. & a wheel,

accompanied by other wheels, would always come to a halt whenever a child would barrow

across the one-way like he was tethered to a friend—or a loose ball glazed

in bacon grease & popcorn oil. Sometimes those headlights froze on a naked dime with

-out renaming a street, avenue, or lane, but often they did not. Rain

was the usual culprit fingered in a series of lineups. Valvoline & water,

the other that shot mothers out of starting blocks, Jackie-Joyner-Kersee beside

their child lying broken in the

road. From our red brick America, this was our rerun, our white

picket fence, our Wednesday evenings Papa made it home, jivin’ he saw a man about a duck.

Praise for Second Nature,

“Chaun Ballard’s compelling debut collection, Second Nature, weds formal engagement and innovation with explorations of American history as it intersects with African American lives. An interrogation of archives and what’s preserved there engenders voices of figures like Crispus Attucks. These poems rooted in those lives—the poet’s family and community—take on broader implications when nonhuman beings like the weaver bird, the robin, and fireweed are brought into the conversations. These poems draw on the past for our present and future. Ultimately these poems are, as one of Ballard’s poems puts it, 'stories' that should be 'ringing in the ear of each generation.'” —Sean Hill, author of Dangerous Goods

“What you hold in your hands is a collection of poems that braids together the unencumbered memories of family lineage and African American history. Chaun Ballard explores what it means to be shaped by others, to make a way in the world carrying the pieces of the imperfect men and women who brought us to this moment. Ballard’s poems speak to the idea of a continuum, articulating the life of the poet on his own terms without forgetfulness or a simple investment in the fragmented lie of the individual. These are poems of community and history, of the collision of time, of what it means to live in ancestry and in the particulars of place.” —Matthew Shenoda, from the Foreword

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