A review by bisexualbookshelf
Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark

emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.5

“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.

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.
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