Field Study

In this daring exploration of Black womanhood, desire, and survival, Chet'la Sebree's Field Study is a genre-bending, startlingly vulnerable prose poem that pulses with raw emotion and searing honesty.

Winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, Field Study is a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and soul-piercingly sharp meditation on the self and our interactions with others. As Sebree attempts to understand the fallout of her relationship with a white man, her control over her own field study unravels, revealing the depth of her feelings in response to the data of her life.

I am society's eraser shards-bits used to fix other people's sht, then discarded. Somehow still a wet nurse, from actual babes to Alabama special elections.

Interspersing her reflections with Tweets, quips from TV characters, and excerpts from inspiring Black thinkers like Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, Sebree fearlessly grapples with her attraction to and rejection of whiteness, probes the malicious manifestation of colorism and misogynoir, and struggles with, judges, and forgives herself when she has more questions than answers.

Thrumming with feeling, Field Study is a singular and provocative piece of writing that breathes life into a scientific study like no other-a poem of love, heartbreak, womanhood, art, sex, Blackness, and America, sometimes all at once. With uncommon sensitivity and precise storytelling, Sebree makes meaning out of messiness and malaise, crafting an unflinching portrait of Black female identity in contemporary America.