Poet Takes 'Reckoning’ of Her Family’s Slave-Owning Past in University of Arkansas Press Book

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A Sunday in God-Years

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Michelle Boisseau’s new poetry collection from the University of Arkansas Press, A Sunday in God-Years (paper $16), takes its title from the notion that if we consider ourselves inside the long stretch of geologic time, human history happens in the blink of God's eye as he rolls over during a Sunday nap. The book is centered around the long poem "A Reckoning" made up of 15 shorter poems/sections (some sections are documents like wills and runaway slave notices). This long poem tries to reckon and recognize the sticky webs that bind the heirs of those who were slaveholders (like the Boisseaus) and of those who were held as slaves.

"A Reckoning" builds the context for the rest of the book which, among other things, looks through the metaphors from geology to confront the historic and personal; Boisseau's paternal ancestors fled religious persecution in France in 1685 and soon after their arrival in Virginia became entangled in slave ownership.

When one looks on human history through the lens of geologic time, when one shifts the scale from the now and near to the distant, and takes a sky-perch, like God, some fascinating things begin to happen. Looking down on the earth from a satellite, from a conjectural place in deeper spaces from which our cameras have never looked, or from a moment long before humans ventured from trees, human history is thrillingly diminished and immediate human compassion becomes essential as air.

In her interview that appears on the press’ Web site, Boisseau writes: “I sifted the material that I had, stuff going in every direction, I realized the poems would have to be about the enormity of the task, the task of confronting how one has benefitted from slavery, the likelihood of failing at the task and the struggle against self-deception. The loops and tangles.”

Noted prize-winning poet Alan Shapiro call’s Boisseau’s collection “fantastic. ... Unsentimental, stunningly alive in sound as well as sense, compassionate, unflinchingly honest, A Sunday in God-Years is a flat out wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read in years.” And MacArthur Foundation Fellowship-winning poet Eleanor Wilner says that “even a ‘ragged chunk of limestone’ opens up expanses of geological, historical, and familial time in the artful hands of Michelle Boisseau, who revisits her slave-owning ancestry for a reckoning. ... Her poems are a unique blend of sensuality, rue, fresh insight, engaging candor, anguish, wicked humor, taut lyricism and a pungent dash of caustic.”

Michelle Boisseau is professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she also serves as associate editor of BkMk Press. Author of three previous books of poetry, No Private Life; Understory, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize; and Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press), a PEN USA finalist, she is also coauthor of a popular textbook, Writing Poems, now in its seventh edition.

The press’ poetry program has recently received some very nice attention from Garrison Keillor’s daily NPR radio show Writer’s Almanac. On Martin Luther King’s birthday he read a poem from the press, A Necklace of Bees, by Dannye Romine Powell. And a few days later he read a poem from William Trowbridge’s 1989 collection Enter Dark Stranger.