With attention to the histories that make and sustain a family--its generations, its roots in certain soils--WHAT PECAN LIGHT exhumes a family's long entwinements in the South and whiteness. Excavating the economic, agricultural, and military roots of the speaker's family tree, the poems of this collection unearth the speaker's complicity in the institutions of whiteness: I was willing / to love a polluted thing. Working against a narrative of innocence, the poems engage the abiding symbol of the Confederate flag, the historical fact of an enslaving, plantation-owner great-grandfather, and the enduring harm of racial violence.

Poetry. Women's Studies.