BOOK REVIEW

Beneath the Understory: On MaKshya Tolbert’s Shade is a place

By Jeffrey Levine     February 20, 2026




Shade is a place
MaKshya Tolbert
Penguin Books (2025)
96 pp. $20 (paperback)

As Simone Weil* likens the closest possible attention to prayer, so MaKshya Tolbert’s Shade is a place enacts an extended vigil.

Tolbert offers not a Southern landscape but—if one may be permitted—a Southern method of attention—one that understands place as a living braid of racial history, civic infrastructure, botanical life, and grief handed down through generations of Black women.

The book opens not with arrival but loss, layered upon loss: “I lost the small book then lost my grandmother / then lost her house then almost lost my mother.”

What returns the speaker to Virginia is fatigue and a cautious hope for rest: “Tell me east will have me back, if / I move softly.” From the outset, Tolbert locates the South not as origin myth or ruinous inheritance but as a place one reenters carefully, carrying what cannot be set down, a river reentered. Even the trees speak in the language of instruction rather than symbol: “At the end of their lives, the trees, / they tell me, Do not stay where you thin. / Can I speak about thinning?” The voice is spare, lucid, already dwelling in the moral weather her poems will patiently walk.

The book’s title phrase--Shade is a place—arrives early and keeps arriving, like half-light through scudding clouds: descriptive, almost plain. Almost disarmingly so. But as the poems accumulate, the shade thickens. It becomes social, historical, administered. Tolbert allows the phrase to gather pressure rather than meaning, letting it pass through context and measure:

You could say this city
is a tree: an open center penetrated by light.
[…]
10 percent canopy decline in fourteen years--
Every neighborhood declines—the citytree is becoming
a heat island—redlining stays anti-environmental.
Still: some neighborhoods heat different.

What begins as observation settles into lived fact.

Slowly, it becomes clear that shade, like safety, has never been evenly distributed. Trees are planted and removed according to logics that long predate any individual walk. They are stressed, felled, replaced, or spared by policies that rarely name themselves as racial, though their outcomes remain legible on the skin. Shade does not redeem the landscape. It reveals how relief has been unevenly given.

Tolbert resists asking trees to carry what belongs to human systems. In “Cuttings from Jena, Louisiana,” arboreal life is pressed into a site of racial violence not through symbol alone but through policy and panic. “Cutting down that beautiful tree / won’t solve the problem at hand,” she writes, after the white oak associated with the Jena Six is removed in the name of starting fresh. Erasure masquerades as reset. The tree is asked to carry history so that history itself might be disavowed, and have we not had enough of this?

Throughout the collection, trees are never allowed to bear responsibility that belongs to human systems—how possibly could they?—yet they bear the marks of the so-called civilized world: they are felled, replanted, made to absorb what power refuses to preserve.

But Tolbert’s shade is never merely meteorological. It is conscience-laden weather, interior, intimate. Shade signals who is to be protected and who left exposed, who takes the heat and who receives relief. The phrase Shade is a place repeats until it becomes something like a discipline the poet must relearn how to inhabit. “You could say shade is my refuge, / this compass of what matters,” she writes—only to have the tenderness of the claim unsettled by civic machinery.

Indeed, the Tree Commission appoints her “out of an urgent need for diversity shade,” a phrase that lays bare how even refuge is administered, rented out, bureaucratized, rationed, and rationalized. Against a Southern tradition that equates land with possession, Tolbert offers a counter-logic organized around shelter rather than ownership. Shade is something one enters into, is merely rented rather than laid claim to. It “costs what it costs” but cannot be bought outright. She names the fantasy directly: “I want shade without property.” The line lands quietly, undoing centuries of pastoral myth and the mythology of ownership in a single breath.

When Tolbert binds canopy to race, she does so without rhetorical inflation. “Redlining stays anti-environmental,” she writes flatly. The trees along the Charlottesville Downtown Mall are planted, stressed, removed, and spared according to histories that long predate the poet’s walks. Even grief becomes climatological. No argument is announced. The body already knows what it knows.

If land and race shape the book’s outer climate, the inner climate is governed by a slow apprenticeship in listening. The “Ways to Measure Trees” sequences form the book’s philosophical spine. What begins in professional language—visual assessment, sounding—becomes practical instruction in how to approach what is already wounded. Tolbert understands, as James Baldwin once put it, that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Tolbert names her earlier posture with devastating clarity:

All my life I was a hammer:
I struck at everything I touched.

Measurement here is not mastery but vulnerability. By Level III, proximity itself becomes risk:

Now I get so close to trees
I feel my nail slip right
through bark—I told you.

Even the forester tempers certainty—“It’s subtle, takes practice”—a lesson that echoes beyond trees to ears, to grief, to judgment, toward a training in attention that values return over arrival, humility over mastery. These poems keep asking what it would mean to claim knowledge without conquest, to attend without violence.

Tolbert plays syntax itself like a custodial instrument in arpeggios of care. In “Tree walk with worry,” Tolbert writes: “I worry even the violence is mycelial / branching from the tree of each of us.” Violence spreads underground. It does not announce itself. A few lines later: “I worry evenly”—a phrase that gestures toward fairness only to collapse under its impossibility. Worry here is not mood but method, the pacing of attention when certainty can no longer be trusted.

Perhaps the book’s most radical formal move is to relocate lyric authority into shared motion. The shade walks are not poems about community; they are poems that move as community. Each begins with invitation—“Will you walk with me?”—and the question never loses its electric charge. People arrive barefoot or burdened. Someone only wants shade. Someone cannot come. Someone sits.

Along the way, the poet listens more than she instructs. “You are your own tree talking to trees,” she tells a walker, a line that grants both solitude by invitation, and permission as a form of solitude. Yet, leadership remains provisional: “Here was a choreography I could follow, even lead.”

The walking itself becomes an ethic—slow, repetitive, non-teleological. “This will take time,” she says, then corrects herself: “Not time.” These poems resist the Southern narrative of arrival, the arc from damage to deliverance. They honor duration: shade shifting across brick, moss climbing wet trunks, wounds sealing only as they can.

Scientific language appears throughout but never as ornament. It functions as archive: a way of reading what damage leaves behind. When Tolbert urges us to “read woundwood / from history,” the emphasis falls on legibility without narrative. Woundwood is not healing. It is scar tissue—the record of harm that could not be undone. Whatever repair occurs is structural, partial, ongoing.

What Tolbert constructs through these walks resembles a kind of holding space—small lyric chambers, spoken almost under the breath. “Some days I want / a vocabulary of the body / more than I want / a body.” These moments do not resolve the larger documentary field. They allow it to breathe.

The Downtown Mall becomes such a container: brick, shade, chairs, chalkboard, walkers, trees. When she writes, “Central leader in me, looking for shade,” the longing is at once botanical and psychic.

One of her most difficult recognitions arrives late:

I mistook trees’ lives
for what I had to give.

The error is not misunderstanding, but appropriation. The correction is restraint:

I hid behind forms, got snagged
on how to be gentle.

This reckoning ends with a quiet undoing of authorship-as-mastery: “What light could I write / being sun myself.” Care, the poem suggests, is impossible so long as one clings to the fantasy of origin, of standing as source rather than being content to stand within illumination.

The book’s smallest lyric chambers—“Some days I want / a vocabulary of the body / more than I want / a body”—serve as pressure valves, allowing the larger documentary movements to breathe.

Late in the collection, the extended shade-walk sequence asks the reader to share in the speaker’s devotion, which is slow by design, which pauses to accumulate. Voices drift. “Each new shade walk, less and less to rebuke.” Even rebuke grows unsustainable. Someone finally asks, “With whom do you think about trees?”

The answer comes Orphically: “Suppose that place / between the trees is less mastery than method.” Here is the book’s ars poetica, offered as conversation rather than claim, a temporal hinge where shadows lengthen and certainty gives way to myth.

Throughout, leaving and returning remain unresolved. “Coming back to Virginia takes the time / it takes.” There is no triumph in return—only recommitment to staying. This is the kind of resolve we might expect from a far more seasoned poet.

What distinguishes Shade is a place within contemporary Southern letters is its refusal of both nostalgia and rupture. The South is neither redeemed through cinematic beauty nor cancelled through historical indictment. Instead, Tolbert practices a form of attention that moves patiently through what persists.

Shade is a place offers Southern literature a grammar for thinking about land as relation untethered to inheritance, where received notions of property are reimagined as provisional care. By situating poetic knowledge at the scale of cambium rather than canopy, of maintenance rather than mastery, of co-presence rather than possession, Tolbert’s shade becomes a holding space—not shelter from history, but a liminal place where inner life and the shared world touch without undoing one another.

This is a debut of remarkable ethical coherence and quiet daring—a book that does not ask to be admired so much as accompanied. It offers a way of thinking about land not as possession or backdrop, but as relation—tentative, racialized, continuously negotiated. Its intelligence is quiet; its daring cumulative. The South is preserved, walked again and again in heat and in grief and in imperfect shade.



*Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951), 57). Attente de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1966), 105. “L’attention, prise à son plus haut degré, est la même chose que la prière.”



​Shade is a place by MaKshya Tolbert

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JEFFREY LEVINE is founder, Artistic Director, and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning literary press. A poet and essayist himself, he is the author of several acclaimed collections and the recipient of twenty-seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems and hybrid essays have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Poetry International, Missouri Review, Barrow Street, Ekphrasis, Colorado Review, and Western Humanities Review, among many dozens of others. In addition to his editorial and publishing work, Levine teaches poetry seminars, consults with nonprofit literary organizations, and is widely recognized for his exacting editorial guidance, his devotion to emerging writers, and his ongoing exploration of lyric craft, attention, and moral imagination. Find out more at jeffreyelevine.com.