Susan Tichy
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 0
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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.