Load in Nine Times: Poems
For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers--including his own ancestors--who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.
Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more "[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor" (Khadijah Queen). "How do you un-orphan a people?" Walker asks. "How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?"
While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker's poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: "I am America's promise, my mother's song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream." Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry.
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Frank X Walker's Load in Nine Times builds a powerful monument to those who served and were not recognized. . . . The language strikes the reader's senses like a flame to a fuse and Walker shows us just why the stories of these brave and enduring souls are still seared into the landscape. This is seismic and significant work.--Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets
As regressive politicians resurrect lost causes in the public sphere, Frank X Walker boldly brings the truth back to life in Black ink. . . . These evocative poems remind us that . . . we still have every right to dream: a right all should have by birth alone but is enshrined by the blood shed to make it so.--Cortney Lamar Charleston, author of Doppelgangbanger
A fired-up return to Frank X Walker's signature soulful verse portraits of historical figures from Harriet Tubman to Black soldiers who fought for the Union. . . . Even amid such destruction, Walker praises Black people's beauty and innovation, the creation of culture and identity amid and beyond war and oppression. As a soldier says: 'some of us was already free.'--Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne
Walker's excellent 12th collection (after Love House) captures the Black experience before and after emancipation in intimate and expansive poems.... Throughout, Walker draws on the emotional and psychological dimensions of poetry to transform slavery from historical fact to lived experience.... These vivid and evocative poems underscore the struggles Black people have faced while offering beautifully crafted, illuminating reflections on those experiences.-- "Publishers Weekly"
