Russell, Lauren: Descent

(Tarpaulin Sky Press, 06/02/2020) Lauren Russell, in her new collection, Descent, ventures into the silences and omissions of her great-great-grandfather’s diary. Robert Wallace Hubert was a captain in the Confederate Army, who, after losing the Civil War, fathered more than twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of them was the poet's great-great-grandmother Peggy Hubert, who, as Russell puts it, was “a Black woman silenced by history.” Russell early on states, “I am writing into the space where one story trails off and another begins—.“ Portraits, letters, census data, photos of military prisons, photocopies of diary entries, and documentation of slave holdings from the National Archives—all of which are braided throughout the collection—help to contextualize what Russell calls her “biomythology,” borrowing from Audre Lorde’s “biomythography.” In some instances, these artifacts and paraphernalia are glimpses into Russell’s meticulous research processes. But more interest