Tennison S. Black’s poetry collection Survival Strategies (University of Georgia Press, 2023), selected by Adrienne Su as the winner of the National Poetry Series, bristles with the sound, texture, and experience of life in the Sonoran. Black digs up roots, tenderly dissecting the speaker’s childhood—the violence that comes with growing up “too girl” in a male-dominated environment.
The speaker’s journey through Yuma, Arizona begins as a homecoming—an uneasy return to a land that crackles with past traumas. This return also presents an opening—a possibility that the desert might be somewhere livable, a place that might welcome the speaker back in a new light. In the opening poem of the collection titled “I was Born for Rainy Days But,” the speaker reflects on how Yuma and the Sonoran Desert was a hostile place to them growing up. However, now upon return, the speaker is seeing Arizona in a new light—grappling with how a place that “has been trying to kill me since I was born into it” might also be a place that is beautiful and missed. And even more than that, the speaker longs for this yearning to be reciprocated—they declare: “I want the desert to care that I’m back.”
Black frames this collection with a deep-seated awareness of the colonial violence that has also shaped the Sonoran. In “The Sunniest Place on Earth,” Black traces the history of Yuma: “Land of the Quechan, the Kwatsáan; / Kokwapa, of Cocopah utterly plundered.” They go through a swift but cutting account of how colonists both disrupted the environment and the people of Yuma, creating river passes and prisons.
In their poems, Black evokes the arid environment of Yuma: “This is the sunniest place in the world, the fifth-driest dot on the marble. Not towel dry, or ash dry—air of casket dry, cracked-open-petrified-bone dry, crumbling-skin dry, three millimeters of rain in a year, diatomaceous place.” And this dryness sticks to the speaker’s identity growing up. In “Nameskins,” Black shows how the desert becomes enmeshed with the different names their mother gives them:
“I hung these up like patterned jumpsuits,
shed nameskins,
took them off,
put another on,
hooked them on cactus tines,
left them to dry in the sun—until
they crumpled with the dry, sonorous shhhhhh
of the Sonoran—noiseless if you weren’t a careful listener.”
Both sonorous and noiseless, the desert is a paradox that Black dissects throughout the collection.
Through the poems, the vivacity of the desert blossoms. Black lingers on the creatures of Arizona: kestrels, and javelina, and rattlesnakes—closely detailing how these animals survive and protect themselves in the desert. “Survival Strategies I” is a litany of survival methods, entwined with the speaker’s own protection of these animals, of little girls who “shade beetles with cupped hands while they cross roadways // and fall in love with rabbits to stay alive.” Throughout this collection, Black so closely brings together the hostility of the desert, the violence of men that the speaker experiences growing up with a tenderness for life, for the small creatures of the Sonoran. And this—this holding onto care in a world that causes so much hurt—is part of the survival strategy.
At the heart of Survival Strategies is a fable told through an extended prose poem, titled “the mother and the mountain.” In this story, Black dwells on intergenerational motherhood, shifting the focus of the narrative from the speaker to their mother. They craft a story of the mother as a bajada in search of a mountain, recounting why the mother left the desert with her child: “With her daughter bouncing on the seat in size-two shoes, they tore off the rearview mirror and rolled west. They rolled through scrub, over gravel and pit mines, over rattlesnakes. Straight through the desert, they rolled. Sprawled flat as divorce papers, she rolled.”
And after this fable, with its devastating account of domestic abuse and the courage of motherhood, suddenly the poems that follow overflow with water. This water is full of grief as the speaker mourns their mother: “An eruption of tear-stained seeds sprang from my cracked / open chest and soaked my mother’s hair.” These final poems fall apart as you read them, they are thunderous and yet solemn, mythic in their hurt.
Both a retrospective on selfhood and a homecoming, Survival Strategies is lyrically alive and sonically dangerous—gritty in the way dirt gets stuck under fingernails—while also deeply caring and heartfelt.
Ally Wehrle is a writer from Midcoast Maine. She is currently an MFA candidate at Western Washington University. Her poems have previously appeared in the lickety~split and Porkbelly Press. In her free time she enjoys getting lost on Wikipedia and befriending cats. She is Bellingham Review's Assistant Managing Editor.
Tennison S. Black is the author of the poetry collection Survival Strategies (UGA Press, 2023), which won the National Poetry Series. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net. Multiply disabled, they are also the editor of the anthology, A Body You Talk To. They reside in Washington State and teach at Arizona State University.
