An elegant selection and poetic rendering of often harrowing trial testimony from survivors of the Triangle Fire in 1911, New York city, where workers died in the infamous fire at the shirtwaist factory.  Well-accompanied by illustrations by John Burgess that enact their own examination.

In No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911, Deborah Woodard creates a book for our moment by excavating and illuminating a famous yet half-forgotten moment of past judicial and economic injustice against immigrants. These mordant, stubbornly human prose poems are collaged from the transcripts of the trial of the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Woodard has an unerring poet’s ear for the alive language of the witnesses, a vividly pungent, insistent language edited and censored by the courts yet straining to be heard. And her book erupts with the wayward realities of human feeling struck out or made invisible by the unfolding narrative of the apparatus of the court. In No Finis, immigrant survivors continue to be heard even as they continue to be questioned and squelched to this very day. Testimony, John Burgess’s drawings of the social spaces the workers inhabited, from work lofts to graves, complements and completes this act of bearing witness.

Sample:

I seen a doorway open. I didn’t know what it was, whether staircase or elevator. Suddenly he started away, and I just got in. The smoke came from the floor below, and I was rubbing against the walls. I said, “Please, girls, my feet!” There wasn’t room for a pin.

See the interview in Adroit Journal:  https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/12/19/a-conversation-with-sheryl-st-germain-and-deborah-woodard/

Plus. see the review in the Literary Journal:  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-no-finis-triangle-testimonies-1911-by-deborah-woodard/

(A novel)

Every family’s past is Gettysburg, Eliza Schnable Friday discovers:  the battlefield of a legendary civil war where truth is the first casualty.  To rescue the wounded and bury the dead, Eliza must use every weapon in her arsenal—fierce devotion, uncompromising integrity, and regional pride.  Like Lee Smith’s Appalachian novels, Allegheny Dream alternates between a physical terrain of mountains and forests and an imaginary landscape lit by flashes of prophecy and echoing with ancestral voices. (Anthony Di Renzo)

During the time of a falling city, I came to the Yucatan and spoke to my Mayan friends, and, through the Mayan language and contact with their lush world, I came to inhabit a different place. During a time of fission, I experienced fusion—the coming together of various forces. This book of poetry recaptures that journey and presents a critique, deconstructing the three major themes that are suggested by the reordered name of a fallen building: TRADE WORLD CENTER.

from the Foreword