Celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the release of Grace Engine with Joshua Burton!

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, March 21st, @ 6PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Unit #2, Houston, TX 77004).

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming. Please note that all tickets are non refundable. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Words carry the dead like henchmen,” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, “I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”

Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and he received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is out with Ethel Press, and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press. He is a Tin House Scholar, a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient, and a Writers' League of Texas Book Awards Discovery Prize Winner.