happy pub day to this absolute beauty!

i’m incredibly, embarrassingly, picky when it comes to poetry. i adore poetry, but only when it truly strikes me at my core and silences my mind, overtaking anything else going on up there (not much, usually).

this collection was breathtaking, full stop. poems about bodies—what it means to live in a body. a Black body. a queer body. a female body. to live in a body that respect is not outright given to, a body that doesn’t always receive respect from it’s inhabitant. to love your body, to love the emotions and feelings that spring from being alive in a body. clark’s writing is both soft & sensitive while full of absolute strength. it encapsulated me from the first page, which i was not prepared for.

tl;dr: tiana clark, you’ve been added to the list of authors whose grocery lists i would read in a heartbeat

(thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review!)

“I think it all takes courage: falling in love, staying in love, leaving love that no longer serves you, loving yourself—”

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on March 4th, 2025 by Atria.

Full Rating: 4.5 stars rounded up

Tianna Clark’s Scorched Earth is a searing, unflinching excavation of selfhood, grief, and joy in the wake of loss. With lyricism that feels both urgent and tender, these poems navigate the dissolution of a marriage, the weight of societal expectations, and the slow, aching process of unbecoming—of shedding the roles that no longer serve and stepping, fully and unapologetically, into one’s own body. Clark does not merely mourn the end of a relationship; she interrogates it, complicates it, holds it up to the light and watches it refract into something both devastating and liberating.

The speaker wrestles with the dissonance of knowing that leaving is right but not painless. She traces the ways she once shrank inside her marriage, learning instead to take up space—to let her body and her desires expand without shame. Divorce here is not framed as failure but as survival, a radical act of self-reclamation. Throughout, Clark leans into the messy, the unspoken, the things that linger beneath the surface: the father she never met, the ghosts that live in absence, the queerness once hidden, now unearthed.

Clark’s language is electric, at times jagged with longing, at times lush and expansive, allowing her emotions to unfurl across the page. Repetition becomes a pulse, a heartbeat, a refusal to be silenced. Fragmented lines mirror the fragmentation of self, while rich, unexpected metaphors—like a knife pulling out of a cake, leaving residue—capture the tactile, lingering nature of grief and transformation. In Scorched Earth, even pain is not static; it moves, evolves, makes way for something new.

One of the collection’s standout pieces, My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship to Work, captures the exhaustion of performing for a world that demands constant output, especially in the aftermath of personal rupture. Clark’s reflections on labor, capitalism, and self-worth deepen the collection’s emotional landscape, underscoring the ways external pressures shape (and distort) our inner lives.

And yet, for all the book’s devastation, Clark insists on joy—not as an inevitability, but as a choice, a risk, an act of defiance. “I still want joy at the end,” she repeats, as if willing it into existence. Scorched Earth is a collection about burning it all down, yes, but also about what survives the fire: desire, tenderness, self-love. It is a book that lingers, that demands to be read and reread, that holds space for anyone learning to emerge from the wreckage of almost-happy into something truer, freer, fully their own.

📖 Read this if you love: meditations on divorce as self-reclamation, the unapologetic embrace of queerness and desire, The Carrying by Ada Limón.

🔑 Key Themes: Grief and Rebirth, Queerness and Desire, Taking Up Space, Divorce as Transformation, Joy as Resistance.

Content / Warnings: Self Harm (minor), Suicidal Thoughts (minor), Sexual Content (minor), Slavery (minor), Rape (minor), Pandemic (minor), Racial Slurs (minor).

The last time I read poetry was in high school (10 years ago) when we had the poetry unit in Literature. I remember thinking that poetry is probably the most subjective writing that you can read. Through your own personal experiences, you can relate to the words and have a deeper connection to and understanding of what’s written. On the contrary, if you can’t apply personal experiences, you struggle to relate and develop a deeper connection and understanding, which is what happened to me while reading Scorched Earth. The writing was absolutely beautiful and eloquent. I enjoyed every poem written by Tiana Clark. I saw themes of belonging, growth, and beauty. I just simply wasn’t able to connect on that deeper level I was hoping to achieve while reading these poems.

Thank you Atria and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available March 2025.

Longing, lust, and libations abound in Tiana Clarke's Scorched Earth. Written in the aftermath of both personal and social upheaval, the poems contend with what is left behind and tries to make sense of residual damage. Travelling as far back as the 18th Century, Clark tackles both personal and historical legacies, grappling with the complexities of living as a Black queer woman in America. I loved the tenderness with which she treated herself, the way she revealed such great vulnerabilities with the reader, the jubilant celebration of so many other authors I hold dear, and the inward progression of the book. Scorched Earth crackles with life!

The author’s deep, raw, and unapologetic voice resonates with such emotional intensity that it feels deeply personal and relatable, capturing the complexities of marginalized experiences. A powerful and thought-provoking work that not only celebrates love in all its forms but also challenges societal norms, leaving an emotional imprint long after the last page.

This poetry collection took a deep and introspective look into the mind of Tiana Clark following her divorce from her ex-husband, as well as other topics like the first black Bachelorette and life itself. The poems were filled with raw and unabashed emotion surrounding that loss and the integrity it takes to continue forward.

To be completely honest here, I am not a poetry lover but I requested this ARC in order to get a feel for new poetry. While I found Clark's work to be honest and well crafted, I didn't resonated with her stories (and that's okay!) I still enjoyed the poems, especially Delta Delta Delta and The Terror of New Love.

Overall, I would recommend to people who enjoy poetry and want to feel inspired to push through. Thank you to Netgalley and Atria Books | Washington Square Press for this ARC!

The first poetry collection I've resonated with in a long time. She writes in a way that made me feel like I could relate to things I have never even experienced.

Thank you net gallery for the advanced copy of this book. This is a poetry collection that is well organized and enriching. The author discusses current events as well as her own past and her feelings about these, Absorbing and impactful, I would definitely recommend.

A thoughtful emotional collection of poems I found myself reading out loud. Clark is strong on imagery and her writing is lyrical. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Wonderful.

Thoughts

There were quite a few poems in here that I could really relate to. The ones on beauty really struck home and were powerful.

So many references to Nashville was nice as well as that is where I am from so it just felt like home.

I don't understand how anyone can harshly just a collection of poems. But, I know I loved the message and prose of each selected poem for Socrched Earth.

Thank you to the publisher for this e-arc!

This was a beautiful and raw poetry collection that touches on grief, religion, heartbreak, and love. I enjoyed how Tiana Clark plays with form in this collection. She doesn't conform to any strict rules for her poems, which I thought helped emphasize the themes that she was writing about. Her imagery is so strong, and her work is in conversation with many other great and important works. This is a collection I will probably re-read because there are so many details and references that I know I'll pick up something different every time.

The themes and the topics chosen were indeed very powerful and moving, but the issue is with the expression. The expression and the execution loses the essence of the message that is being conveyed and dilutes it until it's not longer moving in a way one would anticipate from a collection such as this. Better wording, formatting and sentence structuring would have helped this collection tenfold in achieving what it had intended to. (Rating - 2.5 out of 5 stars).

Thank you so much to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC. This was read-in-one-sitting wonderful. I had the privilege of meeting Tiana Clark last year when she visited my university, and I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me until today to seek out an eARC of this upcoming collection, which she'd read from during her visit. The emotion, the language. So much to love here.

Wow. This was powerful. Tiana brings all of the emotions with this collection. Each and every poem hit me hard. I am here for this.

What a magnificent, moving collection of poetry. Clark does a fantastic job relishing in breaking the rules and maximalism. It's a masterclass in understanding the rules of poetry so that your breaking from it is so incredibly powerful. I love the way that Clark uses the space on the page, allows the text to wind and explore new paths. This is poetry at its best. Highly recommend.

Reading (but more importantly, understanding) poetry has always been a little bit of a hit or miss endeavor for me. I will often get the gist of what the poet intends but that's about it.

Try as I might, I felt that same feeling of "I think I understand, but I'm not quite sure" feeling after reading Tiana Clark's Scorched Earth. Her poems lay bare her feelings about her divorce and her own discovery of self-worth. And while I tried to decipher her poems so that I could fully understand them, I don't feel that I was always successful.

Despite the fact that I am somewhat "poem challenged," I could appreciate Clark's powerful talent as a poet -- her words are powerful, raw, and insightful and for those who appreciate poetry more than me, Scorched Earth is a treat.

Thank you to #AtriaBooks and #NetGalley for this e-ARC of #ScorchedEarth.

Tíana Clark’s poetry collection “Scorched Earth” is a lyrical masterpiece that captures moments of her life and intermingles them with history, jazz, and emotion and joy. She plays with form and word choice, mixing in quotes and references all throughout the book, alluded to at the end of the collection. Interpretation can be subjective but I think the beauty of this collection is that it feels like bearing witness to the human experience, to things that go beyond the here and now and to incredibly painful and traumatic experiences too.

Clark captures longing, divorce, love, queerness- and so much more. It is straightforward in some passages and then there are internal phrasing moments where you feel you are intimately aware of every thought or feeling the author is having. Overall, an incredibly unique collection of poetry, posing both the question and the start of the answer to what remains once you have “scorched” the earth, and started anew.


Thank you to Tiana Clark, Net Galley, and Atria Books of Simon and Schuster for an ARC of this poetry collection!

Scorched Earth is a beautifully crafted collection of poetry. Tiana Clark is a studied and accomplished poet, careful and impactful in both language and form. Clark explores themes of loneliness, self-sufficiency, art, representation, vulnerability, and love. The imagery felt up close and personal like being let in on a secret. Clark also managed to do the nearly impossible and craft a poem about pandemic times that doesn't make the reader feel claustrophobic but actually elicits positive feelings.

I would recommend Scorched Earth to readers of poetry who love exploration of form and subject and those interested in subjects of divorce, sense of self, and love after heartbreak.

I enjoyed this poetry collection. The collection was well organized; each section felt distinct and the poems felt like they matched the section themes and were linked together. Some of my favourite poems include:

- Proof
- My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work
- The Hardest Part of the Human Body
- Annealing
- Maybe in Another Life