Load in Nine Times

Walker’s excellent 12th collection (after Love House) captures the Black experience before and after emancipation in intimate and expansive poems. It opens with an 1841 newspaper clipping from Henderson County, N.C., announcing a $30 reward for a runaway slave. Walker experiments with forms and styles, from free verse to more structured compositions, masterfully blending personal narratives with broader historical themes. In a poem in the voice of Margaret Garner, a formerly enslaved woman who killed her infant daughter rather than allowing her to be forced into slavery, the speaker declares, “Don’t call me Murderer./ Step back from all this./ Stop eyeballing me and the sharp sharp blade./ Take a closer look at the white men... I spared my baby girl not from this life/ but from my life.” Throughout, Walker draws on the emotional and psychological dimensions of poetry to transform slavery from historical fact to lived experience. “Grove” centers on the observations of a Black soldier enlisting in the Civil War alongside other Black men, describing the line of waiting men as “a grove wanting to be a forest,/ ready to see what kind of wood we made from.” These vivid and evocative poems underscore the struggles Black people have faced while offering beautifully crafted, illuminating reflections on those experiences. (Oct.)