A LONG TIME COMING

A cycle of free verse poems carries readers from 1773 to “tomorrow,” focusing on the lives of six Black Americans whose experiences represent centuries of ferocious resistance to extraordinary oppression.

These figures are Ona Judge, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama. A prefatory note explains to readers that this is “a work of creative nonfiction told in…story-poems—flash lines of verse, prose, and quotes—anchored in historical facts.” The author previously demonstrated his straight nonfiction chops with Now or Never! (2017), his splendid account of Black journalists in the Civil War; here he proves equally adept at the more emotive form of poetry. Rooting the events presented in documented history, Shepard distills them into concentrated bursts of truth. In the section on Wells and her decadeslong campaign against lynching, he writes: “More than two hundred Black / children, women, and men were dead / in a two-day attack by Whites / from three states. / History called it a race riot not a massacre / as if the sharecroppers / had burned their own bodies.” Christie’s section-heading black-and-white scenes are as starkly powerful as the poems. The information presented is kaleidoscopic rather than comprehensive; readers will come away with clear senses of who these individuals were and what motivated them, while formidable backmatter, including a lengthy timeline, further reading, bibliography, and source notes, provides avenues for them to fill in the gaps.

Electrifying.