Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley (best young adult book series .TXT) 📕

Larry Neal Writers’ Awards (2016), administered by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” won the 2015 C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International.

“Elephant,” “Hains Point,” and “The Sniper Dance” appear in Written in Arlington, edited by Katherine E. Young (Paycock Press, 2020). “Still Life with Sex” appears in Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby (Literary House Press, 2016). “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith (University of Arkansas Press, 2017). “Kiss Me” appears in Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, edited by Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan (OR Books, 2018). “Jefferson, Midnight” appears in The Eloquent Poem, edited by Elise Paschen (Persea Books, 2019). “My Whitenesses” appears in We Hold America: Poetry from the New Labor Movement, edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones (University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming 2022).

“The Conversation” was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets in October 2014 to celebrate National Archives Month, and “Say the Word” was featured in Poem-a-Day, January 2020; along with “American Rome,” these poems are archived at Poets.org. “Weak Ocean” was featured as Kore Press’s Poem of the Week in 2016. “Death by Chocolate” was featured in “We Will Not Be Exorcised,” a New York Times Opinion portfolio on disability in June 2019, edited by Jillian Weise and Khadijah Queen. “Customer Service Is” was featured as Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week in April 2018, received a “Best of the Net” nomination, and is archived in the Quarry online database; it also appears tandem to “Roundtable Discussion on Poetics and Disability,” presented by Poetry International in May 2018.

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My thanks to the team at W. W. Norton, including Jill Bialosky and Drew Weitman. I am grateful to early readers including HL, MT, GB, JC, AS, EM, BFDB, KD, DAM, AH, CG, NEI, ELR, and members of the D.C.-area poetry community. Support for writing this collection came from the Munster Literature Centre, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, as well as in the form of camaraderie with the University of Tampa Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and the Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus. My love to my family (Beasleys and Pruetts), to the Taylors and Waechters, and particularly to Champneys Taylor.

ALSO BY SANDRA BEASLEY

POETRY

Count the Waves

I Was the Jukebox

Theories of Falling

NONFICTION

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl:

Tales from an Allergic Life

AS EDITOR

Vinegar and Char: Verse from the

Southern Foodways Alliance

Copyright © 2021 by Sandra Beasley

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Jacket design by Steve Attardo

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Beasley, Sandra, author.

Title: Made to explode : poems / Sandra Beasley.

Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020036689 | ISBN 9780393531602 (hardcover) |

ISBN 9780393531619 (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3602.E2558 M33 2021 | DDC 811/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036689

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