This is a book of stately but subtly rebellious poems about racism in America. Ulee, "The Thinker" is a black janitor who holds his tongue while cleaning up after "the white people's children." In "The Slave Owner's Daughter Pays a Condolence Call," worlds collide as southern courtesy confronts southern history. Morgan's title poem, "H.G. Wells Investigates the Tragedy of Colour in America," travels with the inventor of the time machine as he explores life "in ex-Confederate terrain." Wells leaves dissatisfied, ready to set the dial for another hundred years in the future. But it is the "tense forbearance" of Ulee, the patient janitor, which is the heart of this exquisitely wrought collection of poems written by a Georgia poet. -Russell Thorburn, author of Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged and Somewhere We'll Leave the World
These poems-confrontations that bore into racism's social psychology and its scrutable core-contemplate just how innocence is caught and shred to bits in a masquerade of ostentatious courtesy that disguises a crass, vulgar cruelty and a vicious bigotry. In this powerful new book, Morgan unmasks this incivility. From the seemingly neutralized persons represented in these empathetic poems-particularly Ulee, the janitor who functions as Morgan's audience surrogate-we hear the voices of the horrified and the oppressed seeking authentic conference, fair assemblage, and claim.
-Ken Meisel, author of Mortal Lullabies and Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit