Tiana Clark & Emilia Phillips Reading at the Love House

In Tiana Clark’s “Soil Horizon,” a white character makes a familiar, dense plea: “Can’t we  / just let the past be the past?” I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, Clark’s second poetry collection, published last year, explores this question through a series of formally imaginative poems (the book is broken into three parts, divided by the title: “I Can’t Talk,” “About the Trees,” and “Without the Blood”) that draw electric threads between living history and the past. In “Nashville,” which The New Yorker published, a vivid description of a farm-to-table meal corkscrews into a Southern city’s appropriations and racist history, which many of its inhabitants would prefer to believe was soundly in the past, even as they heap “hot chicken for $16” and “fried heat and grease from black food and milk” on a plate. Clark, a graduate of Vanderbilt University’s MFA program, will read alongside Greensboro MFA assistant professor Emilia Phillips, who is the author of three poetry collections, including last year’s Empty Clip.