Letters to Littles’ Mills by Mary Anna Dunn

In Letters to Littles’ Mills, a trinity of angles casts an indelible spell. Mary Anna Dunn not only allows raw history to breathe again, but also conceptualizes it and re-makes it so that we can see clear through to its frailties and follies. Sentiment, and not sentimentality, abounds. Anyone searching for solid ways to come to terms with America’s haunted past will find this book bracing, rewarding, and strangely beautiful.

–Douglas Nordfors, author of Auras and The Fate Motif

 In a work built around real-life words taken from spirituals and the letters of her ancestors, Mary Anna Dunn repositions the languages of a dark time in poems that confront the reader. Dunn’s brilliant sense for sound and rhythm will take you, on every line, through every word, into thought and reflection.

–John Most

Part fictive narrative steeped in the historical, part epistolary record, and part songbook of spirituals, Letters to Littles’ Mills gathers a cumulative power as it weaves together seemingly disparate stylistic elements to render another century awash in moral (or immoral) complexity and violence. Dunn has drawn a local habitation in cadences that recreate its people, its customs, and its enduring legacy of grief.

–Michael Waters, author most recently of Celestial Joyride