Southern Spaces (Apr 2008)
In the Queen City: A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library
Abstract
Jake Adam York read these seven poems in the Gadsden Public Library on January 26, 2008, for an audience that included friends and family members. In various ways, all of the poems attempt to portray the complex and often obscured "psychic geography" in and around York's hometown of Gadsden, Alabama. Several of them deal with various episodes from the Civil Rights struggles in Alabama and nearby states. For York, these histories are inscribed in the landscape. His poems play with truth, witnessing, and collective responsibility, often related to the ghosts of the Civil Rights past.
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