Abide - York, Jake Adam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014)
Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Contents; Abide with Me; te lyra pulsa manu or something like that; Epistrophy; Letter to Be Wrapped around a 12-Inch Disc; Letter Hidden in a Letter to Cy Twombly; Postscript; Mayflower; Letter Written on a Hundred Dollar Bill; Letter Written on a Record Sleeve; Abide; Postscript Written on a J-Card; Exploded View; My Great-Grandmother's Snuff Cup; Feedback Loop; Letter Written in Black Water and Pearl; Laws of Conservation; Cry of the Occasion; The Voice of Woody Guthrie Wakes in an Antenna in Okemah, Oklahoma; Letter from Okemah; Postscript to Silence
Letter Already Broadcast into SpaceAbide; Letter Written in the Breath; Inscription for Air; Dear Brother, ; Tape Loop; Letter Written in Someone Else's Hand; Letter Written in the Dark; Postscript (Already Breaking in Distant Echoes); Letter to Be Read by Furnace Light; Foreword to a Subsequent Reading; Acknowledgments; Other Books in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; Back Cover
In the years leading up to his recent passing, Alabama poet Jake Adam York set out on a journey to eulogize the 126 martyrs of the civil rights movement, murdered in the years between 1954 and 1968. Abide is the stunning follow-up to York's earlier volumes, a memorial in verse for those fallen. From Birmingham to Okemah, Memphis to Houston, York's poems both mourn and inspire in their quest for justice, ownership, and understanding. Within are anthems to John Earl Reese, a sixteen-year-old shot by Klansmen through the window of a cafe in Mayflower, Texas, where he was dancing in 1955; to victims lynched on the Oklahoma prairies; to the four children who perished in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963; and to families who saw the white hoods of the Klan illuminated by burning crosses. Juxtaposed with these horrors are more loving images of the South: the aroma of greens simmering on the stove, "tornado-strong" houses built by loved ones long gone, and the power of rivers "dark as roux."