Made to Explode
Poems
17 January 2023
Description
With lacerating honesty, technical mastery and abiding compassion, Made to Explode offers volatile poems for our volatile times
In her fourth collection, acclaimed poet Sandra Beasley interrogates the landscapes of her life in decisive, fearless and precise poems that fuse intimacy and intensity. She probes memories of growing up in Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson’s shadow, where liberal affluence obscured and perpetuated racist aggressions but where the poet was simultaneously steeped in the cultural traditions of the American South. Her home in Washington, DC inspires prose poems documenting and critiquing the United States’ capital’s institutions and monuments.
In these poems, Ruth Bader Ginsberg shows up at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s show of Kiss Me Kate; Albert Einstein is memorialised on Constitution Avenue, yet was denied clearance for the Manhattan Project; as temperatures cool, a rain of spiders drops from the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. A stirring suite explores Beasley’s affiliation with the disability community and her frustration with the ways society codes disability as inferiority.
Quintessentially American and painfully timely, these poems examine legacies of racism and whiteness, the shadow of monuments to a world we are unmaking and the privileges the poet is working to untangle. Made to Explode boldly reckons with Beasley’s roots and seeks out resonance in society writ large.
Reviews
"Made to Explode makes no attempt whatsoever to fight shy of dazzling and rafter-rattling detonation. Here the poet, known for her smooth mastery of craft and lyric, examines a life lived in and around the capital of her fractured and restless country. She aims unerringly at the contradictions of lush, picture-book days in Virginia, and later DC, with its paradoxes, its stern testaments, its stone institutions. In the process, she redefines her own root. There is unwavering insight in these poems. There is tenderness and personal revelation. There is everything we waited for." — Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art
"A rare and vibrant exploration of whiteness and complicity when it comes to America’s history and traditions, Made to Explode is a courageous interrogation of self, culture, and how we are made. Both unflinching and tender, Beasley’s smart and radiant poems glow with a historian’s exactitude and a poet’s lyrical heart." — Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
Also By: Sandra Beasley 
Count the Waves: Poems
Paperback, 2017
“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”—Washington Post
Count the Waves: Poems
E Book, 2015
“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”—Washington Post
I Was the Jukebox: Poems
E Book, 2014
“[Beasley’s] lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep.”—Abigail Deutsch, Poetry
I Was the Jukebox: Poems
Paperback, 2011
“[Beasley’s] lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep.”—Abigail Deutsch, Poetry
I Was the Jukebox: Poems
Hardback, 2010
The winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize—“fresh, crisp, and muscular.”
