Then by Linda Black Chris Wallace-Crabbe Empires of Clay is the

Empires of Clay is the first full-length collection from performer

Andra Simons

that we can do the seemingly impossible: live through it

for himself and for the millions who constitute the African diaspora around the world

Habib Tengour

Then by Linda Black Chris Wallace-Crabbe Empires of Clay is the"Linda Blacks sparkling poems charm and beguile and then, quite often, twist a small knife. Under a rubric of little involuntary musings, she makes a miscellany of different forms: prose poems, grid poems, extended aphorisms with a sting in the tail, fantastical flash fiction. They toy with nostalgia, trailing threads of real memories into imaginary word gardens bristling with tricks. Words collude allude, slip over each other, with many near misses.