I realize a book that circles a woman’s desperate attempt to gain power, only for her dreams to be mortally dashed, feels a little on-the-nose, especially after the recent US election. But, reader, what if I told you I began working on this book long before the 47th President even became the 45th? In fact, I’ve been writing the story of this woman for a decade. She lived two-thousand years ago. Her name was Agrippina the Younger—she was a noblewoman cum empress who used men as puppets to run the Roman Empire with notable success, yet received no recognition. I found out about Agrippina through the peculiar circumstances of her death—her own son ordered her assassination. This fact hounded me, nipping at my heels. Agrippina was caught in a world of political intrigue, longing for what she was legally denied as a woman: power.
My poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, is as much about the eponymous historical figure as my own fixation. I chase her through books and museums, scouring for every descriptive clause or partial portrait of the largely overlooked empress. I wrote lineated poetry to imagine moments of her life left out of the archive: her childhood on campaign with her Roman general father, the periods of her exile as an adult. Between these pieces are prose poems about my travels to Rome to learn more about Agrippina. Through these, I try to cast a sharp eye on our world shaped by regimes and social systems over thousands of years. If the victor writes history, it is particularly telling how few words from ancient women have endured. Agrippina wrote three memoirs before she died, but none were ever copied, leaving them among the heap of women’s lost words through the ages. The impossibility of knowing the pulsing details of Agrippina’s life showed me time and again how written history is hardly a dependable resource. Considering this reality, history—the stories we tell about events—can feel like a farce. Little of ancient history, especially, is certain. It provokes the sensation of grasping at something simultaneously enormous and slippery.
Each of the books featured here provide a mesmerizing focus on the past. The authors’s points of interest are often radical and subversive: a “feminist” epic; a poem protesting an ancient murder. These volumes grapple with the infinite legacies we have inherited. Histories, epics, wars, desires, myths, and colonial violence act as conduits for these authors to fathom humanity and, often, themselves. In one way or another, each book turned something I thought I knew upside down. I struggled to select only a few, as (perhaps unsurprisingly) literary books on history populate much of my library. Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War, Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha, Linnea Axelsson’s Aednan: An Epic (tr. Saskia Vogel), Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Claire Hong’s Upend, Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya/Onioncloth (tr. Antena), Alison C. Rollins’ Black Bell, Kevin Young’s Ardency—each could stand among these thrilling titles. The books below attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje
This “novel in verse” is about the titular Billy the Kid—a man who, despite seeming like someone out of a dime novel, was real. As a 19th century gunslinging outlaw, Billy is forever braided with ideas and American history. Ondaatje, inspired to push back against the glorification of the Wild West he encountered as a child reading comic books in Sri Lanka, wrote The Collected Works. He includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and interviews, as well as pages from those dime novels of his youth. Ondaatje’s poems are compressed, even restrained, against the expansiveness of his archival material. It is a stunning attempt to suss out who, exactly, was this living legend and how, as Ondaatje writes in his afterword, he was “turned into a cartoon.” Obdaatje explains, “I had to invent Billy from the ground up.” So Ondaatje gives us a man who catches a fly and holds the terrified buzz to his ear. “These are the killed,” Ondaatje’s Billy says before he lists those he murdered. “Blood a necklace on me all my life.”
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
This memoir is an extended meditation on Ní Ghríofa’s relationship with a keen poem from the late 1700s written in Irish alongside her modern experiences of love and motherhood. The keen is by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in response to the heinous murder of her beloved husband, whom she realizes is dead when his horse walks to their home with his “heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” The horse carries her to her husband’s corpse. “In anguish and in grief,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood.” Ní Chonaill’s husband was shot at the order of a magistrate, illustrative of the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland. Though Ní Chonaill’s voice burns through the centuries, we know little else of her life beyond her entrancing descriptions of love and abject grief. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s life whizzes around us as she raises four small children, her ratty copy of Ní Chonaill’s keen in her hands during late-night breastfeeds. Through the book, Ní Ghríofa never stops probing—the archive, the poem’s lines.
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks
It pains me to say this book is no longer in print (though a large portion is in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander). Brooks’s poems are the type that stop you dead in your tracks, realizing you’re at the feet of a formidable teacher. Few things illustrate the remarkable chasm between where I am and where I hope to be more than reading even one of her couplets. Annie Allen traces the life of a young Black girl growing up poor in Chicago. Despite her situation, which most would consider circumscribed, Annie dreams of a life when she will have “melted opals for my milk. Pearl-leaf for my cracker.” Annie falls in love and her beloved goes off to war, described in a heroic, long poem entitled “The Anniad”—combining The Aeneid and our protagonist’s name. Ultimately, Annie finds herself alone, wrung out, “tweaked and twenty-four.” Annie Allen may be one of Brooks’s most formal collections, but its content and overarching themes regarding the dehumanizing realities of racism and poverty are radical. She illustrates how a girl who is caught in the thresher of these bigotries is a worthy protagonist of an epic poem, heroic if only for her survival.
Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil
An Indian missionary stalks into tribal Bengal to spread Christianity when he hears of demons living nearby. In reality, they are two girls adopted by a pack of wolves. The missionary “saves” the girls by killing the wolf mother, and attempts to reshape them into “civilized” humans. They both die young, buried in the graveyard of his orphanage. Incredibly, this story is true. In less capable hands, Humanimal would have been a book that “freaks” the girls further, dehumanizing them in ways the missionary did. Instead, Kapil delves into the brutal realities of the man’s attempts to domesticate girls whose survival was realized by their wildness. She travels to the orphanage and visits their graves, welcomes space for ghostly encounters. Their power overwhelms her. “I wanted to write until they were real,” Kapil explains. “When they began to breathe…I stopped writing.” In this spellbinding, hybrid collection, Kapil scrutinizes the ways in which children are simultaneously vulnerable and potent—and how adults misuse them. The latter tells us more about human behavior than almost anything else.
The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda
Shimoda’s memoir traces the life of his grandfather Midori with a dogged curiosity and profound tenderness. “He was born three years in a row,” Shimoda writes early on, “depending on whose memory is being consulted.” Midori was born in Japan, immigrating to the U.S., alone, as a nine-year-old boy. As an adult, he was an able photographer, making ends meet through portraiture. Yet it is Midori’s camera that makes him vulnerable, suspicious, an “enemy alien” during WWII. He is eventually incarcerated in Montana. Shimoda knows these few facts, which are his lodestars as he travels to Midori’s childhood hometown in Japan, the places Midori lived in the US and was imprisoned after Executive Order 9066. Official documents, photographs, and other ephemera push us along on Shimoda’s relentless but gripping journey to understand a man who, by the time Shimoda was a child, already suffered from Alzheimer’s. The blurry uncertainty about finer details defines the book, while Shimoda’s searing insights into American imperialism, how war serves as permission for brutality in domestic as well as foreign arenas, is undeniable. “White settlers were the original aliens,” he writes while at the Montana fort-turned-prison.
Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
Alice Notley’s brother returned from the American-Vietnam War severely traumatized, ultimately dying from a drug overdose. The Descent of Alette is Notley’s salvo toward the oppressive military system that wrecked her sibling and killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese people. The protagonist, Alette, lives in a grim dystopia in which people are forced to endlessly ride the subway by a tyrant overlord (indeed, many poems start with “On the subway…”). Each page gives a vignette of the trippy world she inhabits where Alette might experience a bleak and fleeting camaraderie before moving to another train. Quotations are used in order to slow the reader’s eye and point to a kind of chorus of voices reciting the events (but makes it difficult to quote). Powerfully incantatory, Alette drags you into its spell. One day, someone tells Alette she must kill the tyrant—the man who keeps everyone in the closed circuit of this world. She goes through a cave network, encountering more figures and scenes as she attempts to locate a means to successfully destroy someone so powerful. Notley maps Alette’s trajectory based on those of myth, epic, and the hero’s journey as she makes her way.
Olio by Tyehimba Jess
Jess runs laps around turn-of-the-century America, giving us portraits of the period’s brilliant Black artists and performers through persona poems and archival material. This is alongside the undeniable violences white America has cultivated and maintained surrounding the Black performing body, particularly in minstrelsy (one definition of “olio” is the second act of a minstrel show). In a poem from the perspective of the pianist and composer Blind Tom, he says of music, “It howls out / my fingers when I reach into God’s mouth / of piano.” Olio is also about the need for song among a community brutally denied literacy for centuries, the crucial moment between the American Civil War and the Great War. Yet Jess’s focus returns most often to Scott Joplin (“The King of Ragtime”). Jess’s invented avatar Julius Monroe Trotter conducts interviews with Joplin’s contemporaries, which Jess bases off of the wealth of literature he read. Jess says of Trotter in an interview, “he’s trying to find himself by tracing the history of Scott.” (I have also written about Olio here.)
Instruments of the True Measure by Laura Da’
Laura Da’’s poetry collection gives electric attention to the violent displacement and cultural genocide of the Shawnee people through following two of Da’’s ancestors: Lazarus (Shawnee) and Crescent (Anglo), both of the early 19th century. Lazarus is a victim of forced migration from ancestral lands as a child. His people attempt to forage for greens and herbs, groping through the foreign landscape “like a tongue / poking around // in the shrill vacancy / of a shattered tooth.” In Instruments, Da’ gives the textures of such life, the wildness of the landscape. (“Blood fused rain-soak / runs down in rivulets / to the grey mare’s / muddy fetlocks.”) She sets these tight, muscular poems beside prose pieces about herself and the historical events that lead to our modern moment. Throughout, Da’ illustrates the violences that curbed access to the landscape and its embodied realities, reducing them to measurements, numbers—surveryed and ready for the taking. As she writes, “Any treaty is an artifact of unimaginable suffering.”
Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez
For centuries, casta paintings were “New Spain’s” ornate, portrait-studded family trees. The purpose of these beautifully detailed paintings was repulsive—to determine if one was “white enough” to have civil rights. (“Casta” and “caste” rhyme in more ways than one.) The white need for the casta, according to Martinez, was “to visually represent ancestors…for public consumption and legal proof.” With castas as a point of departure in this blistering poetry collection, Martinez traces the ways in which white colonizers have brutalized mestizo and Indigenous Latinx people and put them on display. There are lynching postcards, the tour of Joaquin Murrieta’s “pickled head.” Poignantly, among this sharp scrutiny, Martinez includes photographs and descriptions of his family. Martinez’s father was exposed to Agent Orange during the American-Vietnam War and where the terrible chemical touched his skin, it “lost tint in patterned locations across his body, leaving him chalk-white markings—skin a war map of erasure.” This impacted his offspring, including Martinez. The ways Martinez’s body is racialized by trawling white eyes is the legacy of casta paintings of centuries ago.
Hild by Nicola Griffith
I’m rounding out this batch of books with Griffith’s electric historical novel. Hild is set in seventh-century Britain during a period defined by change: battles are coalescing, political seats of power are up for the taking, the new Christian religion is gaining a foothold. The unlikely center of this story is Hild—a young girl who, through her capacity to read the wilderness and give advice based on what she divines, finds herself at her king uncle’s side as his seer. Hild was a real person. Through her royal role, Hild’s powers of sight made her a force in a time defined by desperate brutality. (One wrong divination, and the cost is her head.) Though Griffith is not an academic historian, she immersed herself in Hild’s life. A single document serves as the basis for the entirety of the first two books in this series—Menewood is the second, and equally gripping—which is already longer than the entirety of Lord of the Rings. Griffith describes flora and fauna, mead and meals, battles and sex with such zeal I found myself lost in the events of 1400 years ago.