The key in the door: A review of Joshua Burton’s GRACE ENGINE

 
 
 
 
 

There are many books that tackle faith, and many different kinds of faith to be tackled: belief in oneself, belief in a cause, belief in a higher power. There’s the belief inherent in the act of loving another, and there’s a type of certainty in the coil of one’s fist. In his first full-length poetry collection, Grace Engine, Joshua Burton cements himself as a true poet of faith and unlocks the door for the reader to experience it alongside him. A poet that is in constant grapple with spirituality, Blackness, and the strength therein, Burton wields salvation and catastrophe like both the blade the speaker’s grandmother wore in her wig and the marks left on a man’s chest from said blade.

This is not the first time Burton has taken these concerns to task: one need only look at his chapbook from Ethel Zine & Micro Press, Fracture Anthology, to see how his poetry has angled itself towards reaching for that brutal, elusive thing that is faith. The poems in Fracture Anthology are different in subject and scope than the poems in Grace Engine, taking their cue from Plath’s historicizing of the Holocaust as a way for Burton to discuss the mother’s life and experiences with sexual trauma and PTSD. However, the two texts, Burton’s chapbook and full-length collection, engage head on with established histories of violence against the Black body, more specifically the Black female body, and question how to endure.

Also at the book’s center, a meditation on family, on legacy, and what one leaves for the future. This is not a subtle concern of the work; indeed, the first poem in the collection is entitled “The Hearing We Inherit” where the speaker considers, “In my father’s cruelty, he named me Yeshua. / A name that carries with it the brutality of a brickbat” (3), and then later in the same poem, the speaker considers how, “On one occasion, I mimicked him / calling the younger cousin Black in insult. / The look of betrayal on her face” (4). In Burton’s world, these formative relationships between family members, particularly between parents and children, become their own hauntology.

Wistful, powerful, and unsparing, the poems in Grace Engine defy neat categorization: they are fluid, they are erasures of erasures, text struck through with lines, and full of persona. Walking the line between the elegy and the historical record, these poems ask the world to bear witness to ghosts, to the Black men and women lynched like Jim McIherron and Laura Nelson, Hazel “Hayes” Turner and Mary Turner. The pressure Burton applies to the lyric in his work is evident in this collection, where God’s face becomes a lesula, “long-faced and ancestral like seasons” (7) and the speaker’s mother “wore blackness / like a new wristwatch” (28). The strength of the metaphor alone cements this book as a definitive example of poetic technical excellence. The duality Burton employs in showing the seen and unseen, the story behind the photograph so to speak, cannot be commended enough.

Grace Engine is a beautiful meditation on what Burton’s speaker and all those in his lineage, born into that same legacy of violence, must shoulder, what stings “like a wound pulled in every direction” (43). You should run, not walk, to pick it up, and anything Burton publishes hereafter.

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s work has previously been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. The child of United States Foreign Service officers, their work is rooted in a global consciousness, having lived most of their formative years abroad and studied at Trinity College Dublin. They have a degree in Russian language, literature, and culture from Bryn Mawr College. The recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize, they have won awards from the Ledbury Poetry Festival and Bryn Mawr College, as well as received support from The Seventh Wave and Tin House. Their chapbook, Small Geometries, is forthcoming with Ethel Zine & Micro Press in April/May 2023. They are a second-year in Syracuse University's MFA program. Find their work at Home | Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer (kcbrattpfotenhauer.wixsite.com).

 
ReviewSalt Hillreview, poetry, joshua burton, university of wisconsin press