Kirjahaku

The poems in Rachel Webster’s debut collection Septem­ber often address a fleeting moment. Like the month, the moment can be a single leaf falling or a season of life. Webster’s pastoral poems address personal physical change in the seasons of life, including childhood, love, motherhood, and death.

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.

"Rachel Webster writes with such sensitivity about the profundity of love, the errors of history, and the precipice of death. These poems attend to the flexible borders between bodies and the natural landscape with fire, beauty, and insight. I marvel at this work." Joanne Diaz, My Favorite Tyrants "This book is so beautiful I don't even know how it was made. It feels given." Kristin LeMay, author of I Told My Soul to Sing * "I am mother and virgin," says a Gnostic goddess. "I am she whose wedding is great, and I have never taken a husband." Mary of Magdala-disciple, lover and beloved-has been called many things. Here she is called a river, flowing into and alongside the great river of the God-Man. As the swiftest stream carves the deepest canyon, her voice carves a landscape of intimate, fragile beauty. Rachel Jamison Webster has given us a mesmerizing collection of poems about love's bliss, its rage against death, and its bewildered passage through and beyond it. --Barbara Newman, author of God and the Goddesses