Tenant of Fire, The

The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic.

The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents’ and neighbors’, both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X’s house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.

More Praise

There are books that you read, put away, and only return to when you are browsing your bookshelves, perhaps in search of another book.And there are books like Ryan Black’s The Tenant of Fire that you have no choice but to sit with, think about, and go back to immediately, hoping you captured every detail.

Heavy Feather Review

Plenty of poems are written about Manhattan and Brooklyn but not many about the outer boroughs of New York City. Ryan Black's excellent poems grow from his experience of south Queens, a place of varied ethnicity and economic classes, and such landmarks as Victory Field and Forest Park. That’s to say:  a part of the City unknown to most tourists.

Ed Ochester

Ryan Black is an exquisite craftsman whose material, I think, is time. The sounds it makes: of a speaker losing and accumulating breath in his attempts to record a personal and familial history of Queens, New York. That record is fleeting, fugitive, shaped by, and interested in, white, racialized (and thus violatory) conditions. These elegiac, capacious poems carry conflicting assertions. They are poems of reckoning and ‘awful silence.’ What species of fire can such friction create?

Aracelis Girmay

Ryan Black has written poems of enormous urgency for our time: at once a blistering critique of racism and xenophobia in America, and an equally blistering critique of the high- and middle-brow condescensions that sequester us all in cultural spheres that might as well be holding cells. . . . In a dark time, mindfulness and generous connection are the only possible recourse. Death of a Nativist gives me heart.

Linda Gregerson, from her Introduction to his chapbook Death of a Nativist

Table of Contents

Sample