D'Aguiar (Feeding the Ghosts; The Longest Memory) uses the form of an epic poem to eloquently convey two generations of oppression and sacrifice. The 19th-century narrator, who remains nameless, employs modern language and metaphors to tell his story, beginning with his conception and continuing through the tragic separation of his parents: his mother, a slave, and his father, a plantation owner's son. But this is sophisticated material: what begins as a rape evolves into a romance ("This is the nature of sweet transgression:/ after the fact bodies become solicitous;/ black and white locked in illegal passion"), and the two flee the plantation together. They are captured and humiliated by white men—she is raped repeatedly, sold and taken west; he is bound and defiled. Throughout the 10 sections of the poem, the narrator's voice intermingles with the mournful songs of his 17-year-old mother, Faith, who dies in childbirth, and his father, Christy, who becomes a traveling fighter after Faith's return to slavery. Traditional poetic structures frame the vibrant, contemporary language ("Her love did more damage to her body/ than all the lyrics in all the pop songs slammed/ together have done to a sentimental boy/ or girl in suburbia on a diet of MTV jams") and powerful images of loneliness ("I am stripped bare by the light, bare and/ lonely, my bones wrung clean, the clean/ bones ground to dust, scattered in the four winds"). This saga of a man shunned by society will long echo in readers' minds. Ages 14-up. (July)
