Free Papers: poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave freed in Minnesota in 1860 by Mary Moore Easter

$14.99

“These poems are lit from within by the poet’s connection with Eliza; they feel electric because, with passion and excellence, she fed that connection with imaginative and investigative work. I’d describe the chapbook with an embracing word: they feel necessary.”

–Margaret Hasse, poet, Between Us

“I couldn’t put it down. Eliza grabbed me. The poems spoke to my soul.”

–Daryl C. Dance, scholar and author, In Search of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid’s Mother and Muse

Mary Moore Easter’s Free Papers is dreaming in the archives. Through poems that document and redocument the life of Eliza Winston paired beside poems that reach across time to unite Black women in their quest to rapture the self from the prisons of nation and whiteness, Easter has built a hall of mirrors where one can come out of the other side free, transformed. Here, documents morph like a mind suddenly free from its last shackle. The poetry, freedom’s promise, knows no bounds.

–Danez Smith, Author of Don’t Call Us Dead

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Free Papers: poems

inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave freed in Minnesota in1860

by Mary Moore Easter

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-440-9

2021

Free Papers: poems is a dramatic poem sequence that conveys aspects of what is known and what is imagined by poet Mary Moore Easter about an African American woman’s dramatic escape from slavery in 1860. The poet first learned about Eliza Winston at the African American History Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was galvanized by her story. Indeed, Easter was drawn to Eliza in a way that felt fateful, as if she were being called to witness and not only write about Eliza, but also in Eliza’s voice. From her own century she identifies with Eliza calling herself “a mirror that reflects what it sees,” another black woman claiming “the you that was me.”

Mary Moore Easter is the author of The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist, 2019); Walking from Origins; From the Flutes of Our Bones (fall 2020), and Free Papers. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, Cave Canem Fellow, veteran dancer /choreographer, and emerita professor of dance at Carleton College, Easter is the mother of two daughters and four grandchildren.

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