Flight gives testament to the struggle of skin color in contemporary America. Utilizing both innovation and tradition, Chaun Ballard’s poems give voice to the silenced, proof to the disenfranchised, and life to the gone.

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-946482-13-6

Chaun Ballard was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Bernardino, California. He holds an MFA from the University of Alaska–Anchorage, and his poems have recently been published in Anomaly, Columbia Poetry Review, HEArt Online, Rattle, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review, earning nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Although he calls Alaska his home, for the past eight years he and his wife have served as educators in the Middle East and West Africa.

“The poems in Flight unspool a rich and charmed history of survival into songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race; many of the poems in this collection explore (or allude to) the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson with a brilliance that is underscored by the poet’s extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears.”

“[B]rilliance that is underscored by the poet’s extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears.” —Major Jackson

How to Make the World Beautiful

Take the scent
of a chalk-lined morning.

Sift it into grains.
Grind them into people:

bring them back.
Stuff them in your pocket

when no one is looking.
Keep them on your person

(at all times).
Dig a hole in the dirt

when it is known
a village resides

at your hip.
Unname them

forgotten—
call them

gardens,
watch them grow.

.4 lbs

6 × .5 × 9 in

Winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize.