Habeas Corpus

ISBN-13: 9781844714247 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 76 str.

Jill McDonough

Opis

Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave who poisoned her master. A serial killer, a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity. The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed, and lethally injected; the last to be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough gives us fifty sonnets, each about a legal execution in American history. From four hundred years of documentation she conjures - and honors - a chorus of the dead.The sonnets, headed meticulously by name, date, and place, are poignant with the factual, with words and actions reported by eyewitnesses and spoken by the condemned - so limpidly framed that at moments one forgets the skill that tautens and crystallizes all this into authentic poetry. Taking the words of fifty out of the nearly 20,000 men and women executed since 1608, she reflects them back to us in works of self-effacing artistry. Resurrected from their obscurity these individuals speak our secret history.