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rettaroo's review
challenging
reflective
I might be finishing this at the end of the year, one of the best I’ve read in the last 12 months.
I’m reminded of other powerful hybrid texts that seek to unearth and resist erasure of family/cultural history like Zong and Bad Indians.
I’m reminded of other powerful hybrid texts that seek to unearth and resist erasure of family/cultural history like Zong and Bad Indians.
meganmilks's review
5.0
I met Lauren in Madison several years ago when she was working on the manuscript that would become DESCENT, and I've been waiting for this to be published ever since. It has overwhelmed my expectations. Brutal and exquisite, DESCENT is an excavation of silences in the genealogical record motivated by Russell's acquisition of the journals of her great-great-grandfather, a confederate war captain who fathered (as Russell learns in her research) twenty children by three of his former slaves, one of whom is her great-grandmother. Charged, searching, incandescent, DESCENT is a remarkable work of documentary poetry and a brilliant collection of writing. Read this book!
From the first (untitled) piece:
"I am not writing a history of what happened, which I cannot know. I am writing into the silences, the omissions, what has been left out either intentionally or because by its nature it defies legibility. I am writing into the space where one story trails off and another begins, oddly muddled, or between what some might have thought and what they dared to utter, or beyond what no one was sure of but everybody recollected, or within what only I imagined, bent over a photocopy of a photocopy of my great-great-grandfather's diary and a stack of books and records, trying to fill in the letters between H and P. This is not a history or a fiction. I would like to invoke Audre Lorde's term 'biomythography' and puncture its seams, pull out its hem, and make 'biomythology' from the swaying threads. Thus there may be several versions of the same events. None may be true but all could have been--climbing a web of omission, legacy, myth."
From the first (untitled) piece:
"I am not writing a history of what happened, which I cannot know. I am writing into the silences, the omissions, what has been left out either intentionally or because by its nature it defies legibility. I am writing into the space where one story trails off and another begins, oddly muddled, or between what some might have thought and what they dared to utter, or beyond what no one was sure of but everybody recollected, or within what only I imagined, bent over a photocopy of a photocopy of my great-great-grandfather's diary and a stack of books and records, trying to fill in the letters between H and P. This is not a history or a fiction. I would like to invoke Audre Lorde's term 'biomythography' and puncture its seams, pull out its hem, and make 'biomythology' from the swaying threads. Thus there may be several versions of the same events. None may be true but all could have been--climbing a web of omission, legacy, myth."
aconfundityofcrows's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism
Minor: Rape and Grief
margaretpinard's review against another edition
4.0
I raced through this book after receiving it in the mail, knowing I will come back to it in pieces. A few of the entries made me pause and grapple with the enormity of the experience or the examined ambivalence of the narrator or the incisive rhetorical questions posed. Her five-plus years of weeding through the 'biomythology' of her family tree felt familiar, like lamp-posts in a whirling storm of symbolism and characterization that we find hard to judge from inside our own skulls. I really liked the effort, I appreciated the framing and the research, and I will definitely be thinking of several lines of her poetry in the time to come.
'Nobody in Africa is swinging from trees,' indeed.
'Nobody in Africa is swinging from trees,' indeed.
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