“Where bushes periodically burn, children fear other children: girls”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Artist Caleb Brown: The poem very quickly triggered memories of being an “untended” boy, burning words into logs with a magnifying glass pilfered from my classroom’s science area. I wanted to work on this one as soon as I read it because (selfishly) I just wanted to visit those memories again. Poet Camille Dungy: I love the way the hillside grows out of the boy’s back. It’s true that I think of us as children who grow out of the land, but this imagination has that reversed. The land grows out of the child.
Poet Camille Dungy is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Smith Blue, and the editor of the anthology Black Nature. She teaches at Colorado State University. Artist Caleb Brown, a storydrawer, lives in north west central Massachusetts with his wife, twin boys and a big black dog named Pickles.