Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.

Note about the poem from Melissa Range for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": In the decade I've spent working on my poetry collection Printer's Fist, which is about the abolitionist movement in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, I have dug through archives both digital and physical. One of my areas of investigation has been print culture within the movement, and thus I've done a great deal of research on nineteenth century abolitionist newspapers. Enslavers also used newspapers for their own sinister purposes, of course. The sheer number of "Ran Away from the Subscriber" advertisements in eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers is staggering and sobering. In my research, I looked at many of these advertisements, as well, finding in them important stories of resistance and self-emancipation. There's a great database called Freedom on the Move if you'd like to learn more. I first learned about the girl identified as Juno (most certainly not her real name) from an article by Karen Cook Bell, “Black Women’s Fugitivity in Colonial America,” published on the Black Perspectives section of the African American Intellectual History Society. Using the database Newspapers.com, I was able to find the original runaway ad for Juno, published in the South Carolina Gazette, July 28, 1733. All italicized language in the poem is from this advertisement. Again following Bell’s lead, I consulted the database Slave Voyages for information on the voyages of the slave ship Speaker, captained by Henry Flower. The “place of purchase” for the Speaker’s 1733 voyage is listed in this database as Cabinda, which in the current day is a state in Angola. I also learned from this same Gazette issue that the Speaker departed, en route to London, two weeks after it had docked in Charleston. The Speaker made additional slaving voyages after this one, according to the Slave Voyages database. While I was working on the poem, it fell somewhat naturally into the form of a mirror poem (I'd been reading a lot of Natasha Trethewey and Adrienne Su, two amazing practitioners of that form). I think the form fits the themes of journeying and reversals that are present in the poem.

Winter 2024 | Joshua Robbins Reads “Philomela in Texas”

MQR SoundBy Michigan Quarterly ReviewJan 01, 2024