I don't read much poetry but this blend of verse and history is accessible, eye-opening and tells a compelling life story. I looked forward to getting back to this book each day. It deserves a wider readership than 67 reviews on GR so even if you're hesitant about verse, I highly recommend giving this one a try. ( )

A very creative reimagining in poetry of the life of America's first important Black poet Phillis Wheatley who lived during the Revolutionary War period of American History. The author has done a great amount of research and has a twenty page discussion of what she found at the book's end. Her poems include little known facts such a she married a free Black man and gave birth to three children who died in infancy. I teach History and really learned a lot and got a greater appreciation for this wonderful American author. ( )

I have read 9 of the 10 NBA 2020 longlisted books for poetry now--one I have been unable to get my hands on despite having 3 library cards. This is the book that should have won.

This book is amazing. It is poetry, but it is also history and psychology and so many other things. Jeffers spent years and years researching the woman known as Phillis Wheatley Peters. She has read secondary work, she has read primary work, she has searched for extant letters, done census research, researched the earliest publications about her. So. Much. Work. This volume consists of Jeffers' own poems on topics in PWP's life--her capture and enslavement, childhood and religion, trips and freedom, marriage and friendships. Her writing, its publication, the people she met and knew well. She also includes poems on other African-Americans living in 18th-century New England. They were most definitely there, and I recognized many (but not all) of their names, and I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Jeffers explains her research and thought processes in prose the last section, Looking for Miss Phillis.

This book did not even make the NBA shortlist, and frankly I don't get it. Perhaps they considered it too fact-based, too historical. As a historian, I loved it.. ( )