This collection is full of roads, bones, ghosts, trees, and fields. Daye writes about his hometown in North Carolina, about his family’s travels in and out of the South, about the landscape of the places that made him. There are lots of birds, trees, and tobacco fields. There are highways and kitchens. He quotes The Green Book and The Warmth of Other Suns. Black movement, and the forces that seek to curtail it, are at the center of this collection. There is so much about geography and time, and so much about how the dead move (or don’t), and how ghosts also travel. 

I was so struck by the way Daye writes fields in this collection. Fields appear in nearly every poem. They are sites of violence—the legacies of plantation fields are ever-present, as are the cotton and tobacco fields throughout the South where so many Black families worked after slavery, in oppressive conditions and for meager pay. Fields carry ancestral ghosts, they grow trauma, there is often something sinister about the way Daye invokes them. And yet, they are also sites of freedom. In ‘Ode to Small Towns’ Daye writes: “This is where I danced / in the long moonlight of a field.” In a poem addressed to someone (a family member?) who leaves the South on a motorcycle, traveling, seeking freedom, there’s the line “breaking for a field’s freedom.” 

In ‘I Don’t Know What Happens to Fields’ Daye writes, “I’ve made whole days out of fields” evoking a kind of time-outside-of-time, as if fields, or at least this field in this speaker’s creation, operate and exist on different time. In the next poem, ‘From Which I Flew’ the first stanza reads: 

“Only together holding their hands in silence can I see what a field has done 

to my mother, aunts, and uncles.” 

Here, the field isn’t acting as a refuge but as a perpetrator of violence. Fields hold memoirs, grief, the possibility of freedom, knowledge, sustenance, sometimes literal bones. In one poem they are how the family measures the distance, counting the fields from one destination to the next. In another poem, Daye uses a field as a way to mark the passage of time, to mark change in a body. “I have a different body, a dented body, / fieldless and far gone.” 

‘Miles and Miles above My Head’ begins with these extraordinary lines: 

“my grandmother an unworkable field 

full of shooting stars 

in the soil of that field is everything my family needs 

to turn our traumas into river current” 

This passage is astonishing to me—a grandmother becoming an unworkable field—an act of refusal that turns the field from a site of violence into a “river current”. The transformation happens right there in the poem, this incredible movement of a field as a site of forced labor and racial violence to field as the embodiment of a beloved grandmother who refuses to labor, a field “full of shooting stars”, a field of endlessness, freedom. 

My favorite poem in the whole collection is ‘On Finding a Field’ — I gasped when I read it, felt it breaking and shimmering across my skin. In this poem, a field is a resting place, a longed for, looked for place, a place in which the speaker can finally, finally set down the weight they’ve been carrying. “I’ve been looking for you so long” it begins. And yet even in this beautiful poem about a field as a place of respite, it’s not so simple. There’s this stunning section in the middle in which the speaker asks the field a series of questions: 

“Can I plant my heart somewhere 

in your mud? May I lay down awhile 

under the magnolia in your middle? 

Can I dig you up?” 

It’s this last question that gets me. The speaker has found this field that they have been looking for so long, asks if they can plant their heart inside it and then says: but also, can I destroy you? All the ways Daye has been thinking and feeling about fields in the collection merge for me in this poem, where the field is both needed but perhaps feared, where the field offers some freedom, some sacredness, a rootedness—which is so interesting given how much movement and travel there is in the collection—but does so, partly, through its own imagined loss. There’s something here I can’t quite articulate yet that points to freedom as always in motion, as something none of the speakers of these poems ever arrive at, but that they build, create, continually, in pockets. There’s a contradiction in it that sings for me, where nothing is fixed. Fields are both violence and freedom, they are always in the process of becoming, they are not static. They are alive, and these poems tangle with them both physically and metaphorically. 

It makes me think a lot about Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson, in which fields are also a site of complex change, deep ancestral trauma, violence, witness, freedom. Benson writes poems in which fields become places-out-of-time where Black lovers create worlds white supremacy cannot touch. Maybe this, too, is part of why the fields in this book spoke to me so powerfully. They don’t so much reclaim fields from the history of violence that has been done in them in the name of white supremacy, as they completely redefine the boundaries of “field” and what happens there.