| Had
slaves.
Two words, stumbled across while going through family papers, upended
everything poet Catherine Sasanov thought she knew about her Missouri
ancestors. Using extensive research and imaginative speculation,
Sasanov not only constructs fragments of what might have been the
lives of the central figures in this tragic drama—the eleven men,
women and children held in bondage by her great-great-great-grandfather
and his family—but also offers a larger view of American slavery
and the artifacts and attitudes that are its ongoing legacy.
Had Slaves
is the winner of the inaugural Sentence Book Award, which
goes annually to a manuscript consisting entirely or substantially
of prose poems or other hard-to-define work situated in the grey
areas between poetry and other genres - work that promotes the mission
of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics to extend the conception
of what the prose poem is or can be.
"Sasanov demonstrates here, as she
has in the past, that it is possible to tell a story in verse
that takes advantage of what makes poetry so powerful, its magnificent
potential for restraint, economy, and a kind of emotional precision
that nearly defies comprehension."
- Sima Rabinowitz, NewPages.com
"After research and soul search, Catherine Sasanov leaves
us with a distillation of thought on the brink of extinction.
Poems that breathe with the urgency of last resort, as though
every other means of expression had been exhausted."
- Ruth Maleczech, Mabou Mines Theater Company
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