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Guarded by a Cicada Shell
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A
Sunday in God-Years
Poems by Michelle Boisseau
A poet reckons with her slave-owning
ancestry
“A Sunday in God-Years is a fantastic book. Boisseau
has composed a suite of historical poems set at the intersection
of personal and collective life, a book in which private grief
and public sorrow are different aspects of a single legacy,
a legacy that’s both a privileged burden and a burdensome
privilege, encompassing heart wrenching intimacy and cultural
nightmare, the beauty of nature and the fragility of family
bonds. In every line on every page of this beautiful and ambitious
book, the present comprehends the past ‘the way the
sidewalk burns hours after / the sun’s gone down.’
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.”
—Alan Shapiro, author of Old War: Poems
“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.”
—Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her
Hair
“The title of this splendid book reflects the tonal
complexity of these richly layered poems. . . . Boisseau sounds
like nobody else and her vision
demands our attention.”
—Mark Jarman, author of Epistles: Poems
A
Sunday in God-Years 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 fifteen 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 slave holders (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 begins to happens. Looking down
on us 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.
Michelle Boisseau
is professor of English at the University of Missouri-
Kansas City where she also serves as associate editor of BkMk
Press. She is the author of three books of poetry, No
Private Life; Understory, winner of the Samuel
French Morse Prize; and Trembling
Air, a PEN USA finalist. She is coauthor of the popular
book Writing Poems, now in its seventh edition.
February
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 100 pages
$16.00 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-901-8 | 1-55728-901-8
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