Lauren Russell’s Descent came out from Tarpaulin Sky Press last month—a gorgeous hybrid book that I count among the best recent poetry collections.
From Tarpaulin Sky:
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary’s omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present.
Read this great Poets & Writers interview with Lauren (in which I get a little shout out).