Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound [Paperback]

Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection,Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these poems, fugitive persons evade slave patrol hounds by climbing magnolia trees, use the cover of night and the detritus of a shipwreck to swim to freedom, and find temporary refuge in a cabin where a woman offers bread and water. Throughout, Smith poignantly envisions their flights to freedom—passages that were fueled by love, hope, and impossible dreams. She unceasingly gives voice to those who found courage in both bondage and freedom. InRunagate, the enslaved regain their stories and return to the sensory world.USCrystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection,Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, stories, and fugitive runaway ads.Crystal Simone Smith is Instructor of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and author ofDark Testament: Blackout Poems.“Runagateis a collection of poems that looks the harsh truths of slavery in the eye and turns its savagery into sorrow songs and temples of beauty. Crystal Simone Smith refuses to abstract the dead. She illuminates our human capacities to be virtuous or lethal, to still ourselves or steal our freedom. Her artful narratives about slavery are powerfully imagined because the poet deals in facts and truths about American slavery that few have told with this much clarity.”Timothy B. Tyson, author of,The Blood of Emmett Till