Tragic City
by Clemonce Heard

Heard’s sojourn in Tulsa and the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre comes to a head in these poems that investigate the incident’s resounding trauma with lyric and historic precision. The absence of reckoning a century after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is soldered together by a series of poems based on Heard’s time living on the fringes of the city’s art district and what was once Greenwood, Tulsa’s thriving Black neighborhood. Heard blends survivor testimonies, myths, and present intelligence with his own lived experience and a farrago of forms to feel his way to a more intuitive truth of what isn’t documented.