From an award-winning poet, a rousing act of erasure poetry that compels us to reexamine one of America’s most significant founding textsCrystal Simone Smith’s powerful work exposes the uncomfortable truth about America’s founding text. While Common Sense is celebrated as a cornerstone of American democracy, Thomas Paine's arguments for “total freedom and equality” were written exclusively for white men—completely excluding women and people of color from h...

Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection, Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these ...

In this extraordinary collection, the award-winning poet Crystal Simone Smith gives voice to the mournful dead, their lives unjustly lost to violence, and to the grieving chorus of protestors in today's Black Lives Matter movement, in search of resilience and hope.With poems found within the text of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, Crystal Simone Smith embarks on an uncompromising exploration of collective mourning and crafts a masterwork that resona...