Eden, a small town in the Great Copper Basin of southeast Tennessee,
where 100 years ago, an African-American community is forced out
overnight, following the lynching of three young black men; Malaga
Island off the coast of rural Maine, where around the same time, a
mixed-race community mysteriously disappears on the eve of the State's
eviction: these disruptions and dispossessions form the arc of Todd
Hearon's new mixed-genre collection on "sundown towns" and communities:
areas of the United States that historically have been made, and
maintained, all-white. Exploring the effects on the victims--and the
perpetrators--Crows in Eden offers an imaginative and empathetic look
into buried shame, past dispersions, ongoing denials: the land's abiding
legacy of an open wound.
"Todd Hearon's Crows in Eden is an unflinching look at America's long
history of white terrorism and racial expulsion, told by one who knows
southern white culture from the inside. Whether he is uncovering the
buried sins of Eden, Tennessee, or documenting the banished black
community of Malaga Island, Maine, Hearon seeks no less than to reveal,
at last, 'a history never written down.' By turns brutally honest and
poignantly elegiac, these poems are a vital contribution to the real
history of home." -- Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A
Racial Cleansing in America
"In Crows in Eden, Todd Hearon practices that rare brand of poetic
ingenuity, one attuned to the modal phrasings of history and those
voices carried over time by wind and imagination. Underpinned by a deep
faith in language and form, the poems here, perceptive and lyrical,
forgo amnesia in favor of a perpetual light, and what Hearon
devastatingly uncovers is nothing less than our brutal past, and yes,
the paucity of our humanity. Yet Crows in Eden has within its vision
that city on the hill, some future America, sustained by moral and just
measures of sound and fury." -- Major Jackson
