Description
Book SynopsisPoet Lisa Russ Spaar collects fifty contemporary poems - most original to this anthology - that engage the complex legacy of Thomas Jefferson and his plantation home at Monticello. Many of these poems wrestle with the history of race and freedom at the heart of both Jefferson’s story and America’s own. Others consider Jefferson as a figure of Enlightenment rationalism.
Trade ReviewThe remarkably varied perspectives of these poets give life to Monticello and to Jefferson, capturing him not only in his own complicated time but also considering what he means for all time."" — Susan R. Stein, Richard Gilder Senior Curator and Vice President for Museum Programs at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello
""Our least predictable, most contradictory founder, a scholar, builder, inventor, revolutionary optimist, liberator, oppressor, skeptic, and sometime self-deceiver, Jefferson—along with the places he planned—gives these contemporary poets an inexhaustible subject and a multiplicity of roads to approach it. Here are his roses, his pomologies, his hypocrisies, his horses, his bees, his diaries, his families, in monostichs and understatements and rhymeless tercets and elaborate qualifications and quite a lot of ways to look at the contemporary language—and at the language that he would have used, and at the house and grounds where he—and his loved ones, and his ideals, and the people he claimed to own—also lived. ‘Every story begins here,’ writes one poet, Tracy K. Smith; this various collection invites us to ask how she might be right."" — Stephen Burt, Harvard University
