Second Nature (Paperback or Softback)

Winner of the 23rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.

Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation.

Through innovative re-imaginings of the sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form and content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain structures of oppression.

Interspersed with quotations and inspired by the rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenoda who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature is a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped by community and country.­­­

Chaun Ballard is a doctoral student of poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of the chapbook Flight (Tupelo Press), which received the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Ballard's poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The New York Times, and other literary magazines. Ballard lives in Lincoln, NE.