Tragic City

groove] with the upright history / of a people.” Heard provides many occasions for readers to meditate on the Tulsa Race Massacre — not as an exercise in “wokeness,” but as a means of launching grace. These poems model benevolence and presence, and I for one will return again and again to their virtues and music."  — Major Jackson, Judge, Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry "Clemonce Heard’s penetrative and muscular debut probes the blatant brutality perpetrated by white men from the towering perch of their self-imposed birthright — with unerring focus on the “tragic city” of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, in 1921, that mercenary privilege resulted in the utter decimation of the flourishing black community of Greenwood, and the deaths of hundreds of its citizens. Since the massacre is still unknown to so many, Heard urgently transports the reader into the moments of the tragedy, reviving the people and places that gave Greenwood its pulse — then moves into the disquieting present day, where the circumstances that led to that titanic loss still exist, and still resound."  — Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art