The best books with poetry inspired by history

It’s a beautiful book, from the cover to the notes. It’s a neo-slave narrative that follows various enslaved, then freed people. Through this book, I learned how poetry collections can be explorations of history based on fact.

Like any good collection, reading one poem compels you forward, but each poem can stand on its own. She is a master of form. For instance, her persona poetry is powerful. The first poem in the book, “The Trapper’s Boast,” devoid of empathy, shows the business of slavery from an undesirable point of view. 

But what is moving is the ability to fall in love and to care even in the worst conditions, as well as the will to live and strive towards freedom in spite of any threats.

I started writing neo-slave narrative poems about a woman escaping slavery. I imagined that the poems I was writing, like Suck on the Marrow or Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (also a great book), would either grow into a full-length collection or a chapbook. They did not. I had less than enough for a chapbook and I was writing poems about protest, music, and love that did not fit the neo-slavery poems, but spoke to American history and present. When compiling the poems for my manuscript, I revisited Suck on the Marrow many times, as well as other books, to understand how to organize my work. 

Also, though the subject is not quite the same, we do both talk about enslaved people and getting to freedom. 

This is a biography of Mother Ann Lee, the woman who brought the Shaker Religion to Colonial America. Extensively researched and beautifully rendered, these poems grab you and bring you into eighteenth-century England and New England. It is also a celebration of motherhood, love, death, and grief, as well as of an early American woman in leadership. Sometimes deceptively soft, the movement and violence of Colonial America will snap the reader forward, inviting us to question our past.

I revisited Ross’ book when writing about historical figures, mostly real. In my book, I looked at some historical figures, including Tituba and Harriet Tubman, and found reading Seedlip and Sweet Apple a good primer in writing historical poetry.

Physically, a beautiful book. There are these drawings made with scratchboard illustrations and actual lace from a factory in Scranton, PA. The poems are gorgeous, whimsical pieces about a young woman in particular, but working women in general who produced lace. 

Though historical, the factory did not close until 2002, and the building still stands. The book, however, is set in the past, in the 1930s, and follows a lesbian who works in the factory. I love the way that both Douaihy and Hermanson play with negative space, the white, and the dark of letters or lace. 

Of course, I looked to this book for the historicity of it, and how Douaihy handled one character over time.

This book mixes personal poetry and history and art and space. It is a wonder! Smith looks at the Hubble Telescope and all of its marvels along with one of its engineers, her father Floyd Smith. 

Smith mixes stars, David Bowie, mass shootings, love, racism, sexism all in this poetry collection and somehow, it works. It more than works. It explodes! 

I don’t know if this work has much to do with my own; there is history, yes, and there is social commentary. But mostly, there is excellent poetry that is exemplary for any poet writing today.

These poems—most of every poem that Lee writes, really—do more than paint a picture. These poems appeal to every one of your senses. They are rich in description and you want to savor each one, sit with it, and let the poem envelop you. 

I heard or read somewhere that Li-Young Lee is a slow writer, not producing a lot of work but always producing good work. I don’t know if this is true, and except for my greed of wanting to consume more of his words asap, I don’t mind that his poems are slower coming. I like to spend time with them.

I share Rose because Lee teaches me—and my students—that writers depend too much on visual imagery and fear spreading out into the other senses.