Description
Poetry. Rigorously interrogating three hundred years of family history in Scotland and Maryland, TRAFFICKE tracks and remixes questions of race and identity, fact and legend into a mosaic of verse, lyric prose, historical narrative, and quotation. As it strips away the glamour—in the old Scottish sense of a spell, an illusion—TRAFFICKE takes shape not as a simple uncovering of truth, but as a dis-spelling, a building and tearing down of identity's various disguises, of power's relentless self-justification, of the poet's own bitterness and complicity. Stepping forward and backward in time, sampling texts that range from 16th-century Gaelic poetry to runaway slave advertisements, Tichy's narrative pulls readers through a many-layered critique of ownership and the timeless seduction of beauty. Violence and language, literacy and desire—these too are characters in the lyrical, fraught, and grief-charged text of TRAFFICKE.
Author Bio
Susan Tichy is the author of four titles from Ahsahta Press: THE AVALANCHE PATH IN SUMMER (2019), TRAFFICKE (2015), GALLOWGLASS (2010), and BONE PAGODA (2007). She is also the author of A Smell of Burning Starts the Day, and The Hands in Exile, a National Poetry Series title. Her poems, collaborations, and mixed- genre works have been widely published in the US and Britain, and have been recognized by numerous awards. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at George Mason University.
Author City: FAIRFAX, VA USA