Necessary Past

Annette Debo is a professor of English at Western Carolina University. She is the author of The American H.D. (2012) and editor of H.D.'s Within the Walls and What Do I Love? (2014), as well as coeditor of the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching H.D.'s Poetry and Prose (2011).

• PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction The Contemporary Wave of Historical PoetryChapter 1 Praising the Seers: Celebrating the Historical Influence of Robert Hayden, Michael S. Harper, and Rita DoveChapter 2 Digging Up the Past: Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus HottentotChapter 3 Tending the Graves: Natasha Trethewey’s Native GuardChapter 4 Achieving the Extraordinary: A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-AChapter 5 Sampling History: Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The RemixChapter 6 Reconciling the Past: Frank X Walker’s Turn Me LooseChapter 7 Excavating Captive Lives: Camille T. Dungy’s Suck on the MarrowConclusion The Historical Impulse, the Zeitgeist of a Generation NotesBibliography

“As a sharp-eyed and hospitable introduction to the most ambitious poems of Elizabeth Alexander, Camille Dungy, Kevin Young, and company, this book has few equals. And its central focus—the fine art and raw politics of retelling Black history in the twenty-first century—could not be more relevant.” —William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis