Boston-based poet Tiana Clark hopes to show her courage and confidence with her award-winning poems. In her new book, “Scorched Earth,” Clark, who is also a professor at Smith College in Northampton, blends history, race, gender and grief within her collection of intimate poems.

“I always say my poems are bolder than I am, they’re more courageous than I am,” Clark told Under the Radar host Callie Crossley. “And I think for me, I wanted to inhabit that confidence that I didn’t feel in the world.”

Clark credits her creative writing teacher in high school with inspiring her love of poetry, which emerged after reading a poem by Li-Young Lee.

“The language was so lyrical and so magical that it just kind of drew me in,” Clark said. “There was this musicality in the language that really drew me to poetry at that time in my life.”

Lee and other poets of color like Rita Dove and Phillis Wheatley inspired Clark’s poetry, and she includes attributions to many of them within her work. It was these poets who also indicated to Clark that she could work through topics like race, the body and the divine within her writing.

The topic of struggle inspired the title of “Scorched Earth,” which is also one of the poems featured in the book.

“I was interested in thinking not only about the historical significance of scorched-earth campaigns that we know from war that obliterate the landscape, but it’s also thinking about that psychological place of ruin,” Clark said. “And so I wanted this idea of looking back at a landscape and not being destroyed, but actually finding beauty in the ruins, finding a message in all the mess.”

Despite Clark’s confidence oozing through this collection, she said that when she was writing these poems in 2016, she felt more invisible than invincible.

“I was like, I’m not gonna let my artistic self, myself on the page, feel small,” she said. “I want this to be audacious. I want it to be unapologetic. I wanna speak back to everything that’s making me feel invisible.”

Tiana Clark’s “Scorched Earth” is the April selection for Bookmarked: the Under the Radar book club.

Guest

  • Tiana Clark , professor, poet and author of “Scorched Earth”