The Best Way To Expose Grace is Through Singing

Who deserves grace? Who decides about it? In a world rampant with cruelty and grief, what does or can or should grace even mean? These are some of the questions raised by Joshua Burton’s debut poetry collection, Grace Engine (March 2023, University of Wisconsin Press).

Grace and engine, spirit and machine, divine benevolence and man-made apparatus, the warmth of prayer and the cold injustice of systematic oppression—Burton’s gut-wrenching poems interrogate these half-contradictory intersections as the poet grapples with mental illness, grief, faith, forgiveness, and a history of violence against Black people in the United States. 

The traumas that Burton probes are both personal and historical—though, of course, the two are never distinct, and one of the great feats of this book is that they are never treated as such. In the poem “Giving Jim Grace” (addressed to Jim McIlherron, a Black man who was lynched in Tennessee in 1918), Burton writes that he “reach[es] for stories” in the dead “for catharsis.” The poem begins:

Lyric is a lie to the sentence and snow is a silent engine.
While in it, all I can imagine is a slow torch prodigal

in its returning. I entered your story, Jim, like a crow to a cloud.
Leaving Houston, all I could see was the potential of snow

on my fingers. And I know that I notice blackness
when separated from blackness. And know that I am a motor
running off of grief. (52)

Grief, in this poem, is situated historically but also personally. Looking at the horrors of past racism leads Burton to question his own relationship with Blackness, with family, and with poetry itself. “Telling the truth could kill us,” Burton writes later in this poem, which contrasts the lyric and lies (as ways of feeling) with the sentence and truth (as ways of knowing). In the end though, as Burton’s speaker reunites with family—“only kin can sentence / the sentence” (53)—and begins to come to terms with grief, he suggests these relationships are not necessarily opposing ones: 

On my skin where I picked at quills, I wrote:
Grief is a happiness too. Suddenly, feeling family

as opposed to knowing family, we can bear these truths.
I was heavy about myself because snow does something
to you the way flesh burns memory into you—

And I know if lyric lies to us, it must still reveal
a skin perfected in its low glow. (53)

Burton, Joshua. Grace Engine. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. 75 pp. $ 16.95

If lyric poetry can bestow grace, it isn’t only in retrospect—poems like “Giving Jim Grace” achieve their urgency because, as Audre Lorde asserted, “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives” (Lorde 24). Thus is the personal and political power of the lyric alongside the traumas of past and present—the quality of light in which poetry, in which our looking and singing, reveals, as Burton writes, “a skin perfected in its low glow” (Burton 53). 

Some poems in the book are addressed to Laura Nelson, a Black woman who was raped and lynched alongside her fourteen-year-old son in Oklahoma in 1911; and Mary Turner, a Black woman lynched in Georgia in 1918. There’s also a series of poems (one poem and two subsequent erasures) in the voice of William O’Neal, the FBI informant in Chicago who infiltrated the Black Panther Party and whose intel led to the murder of Fred Hampton in 1969. Many suspected that guilt for his role in Hampton’s killing led to O’Neal’s suicide in 1990, but Burton’s poems seem more interested in interrogating blame than assigning it. In Grace Engine, looking back at the traumas of the past is a way of understanding the traumas of the present, and, if not of healing, then at least of trying to.

Royal Robertson is another of Grace Engine’s touchstone figures. Robertson was an artist and self-proclaimed prophet from Louisiana whose schizophrenia led him to see visions of spaceships and made him believe that his wife was unfaithful and that he was not the father of the twelve children they had together. After his marriage ended, Robertson filled his yard with his artwork, which drew scorn from his neighbors. Burton, who elsewhere writes openly about his own struggles with mental illness and frequently calls into question the healing power of art itself ––“this is how the lyric will tear / you in two” (41)–– writes persona poems as both Robertson and his ex-wife, Adell Brent.

One of the stand-out poems about mental illness and art comes early in the collection; in “Grace Division,” the speaker—who writes of a past involving mental illness, drunken nights, childhood knife-fights, and a stolen pistol—suggests that his continued existence is nothing short of spiritual warfare:

During my second stay at Cypress Creek Hospital,
I held my little maroon journal
as ammunition

Reclaiming yourself is a skill

like warring is a skill. The hull and mull
of the white space

in my stomach held a religious
ache. I didn’t sleep for days. (10)

That poetry becomes, not only something akin to religious meaning, but also a way of reclaiming the self—of “a sharp mirror warring itself / into a witness” (12)—is evidenced in Burton’s careful attention to music, rhyme, assonance, consonance, and alliteration.

In fact, in poems like “To those who count suicide as a spiritual warfare addendum,” sound play becomes the guiding poetic principle:

Souls lull
to lust.
Slots us
out, louts.
Lost us—
O us, out
to lots. Too
lost. (13)

In this poem, it seems to be the lyric itself (in the oldest sense of lyric—music, sound, song) that carries readers, inebriated and tongue-twisted, to the contradiction of being alone (“solus”) and disoriented in the world together (“us”) at the poem’s conclusion: “Us lost solus / sots” (13).

The interdependency of “I” and “we” is no coincidence here. The book itself is divided into two sections: the first named by the singular pronoun and the second by the plural. And the progression from one to the other implies something quite similar to the overlapping of personal and historical narratives throughout—that is, that grace, whatever it may be, must extend beyond clear-cut dichotomies.

A book that looks long and hard at lynching, suicide, and grief, Grace Engine is no easy read—its subject matter and lyrical density often made me physically tired. But I can’t help but feel that the book is ultimately full of hope, and that heart of the book is survival—the quest, we might say, to turn the “motor / running off of grief” (52) into an engine that runs on grace. “Now, the ghosts come to me / in threes,” Burton writes in the book’s opening poem, where he greets them with forgiveness and this blessing: “I love you all, and love you and love you / and love you” (5).