Crows in Eden

Eden, a small town in the Great Copper Basin of southeast Tennessee, where 100 years ago, an African-American community is forced out overnight, following the lynching of three young black men; Malaga Island off the coast of rural Maine, where around the same time, a mixed-race community mysteriously disappears on the eve of the State’s eviction: these disruptions and dispossessions form the arc of Todd Hearon’s new mixed-genre collection on “sundown towns” and communities: areas of the United States that historically have been made, and maintained, all-white. Exploring the effects on the victims—and the perpetrators—Crows in Eden offers an imaginative and empathetic look into buried shame, past dispersions, ongoing denials: the land’s abiding legacy of an open wound.

“Todd Hearon’s Crows in Eden is an unflinching look at America’s long history of white terrorism and racial expulsion, told by one who knows southern white culture from the inside. Whether he is uncovering the buried sins of Eden, Tennessee, or documenting the banished black community of Malaga Island, Maine, Hearon seeks no less than to reveal, at last, ‘a history never written down.’ By turns brutally honest and poignantly elegiac, these poems are a vital contribution to the real history of home.” — Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“In Crows in Eden, Todd Hearon practices that rare brand of poetic ingenuity, one attuned to the modal phrasings of history and those voices carried over time by wind and imagination. Underpinned by a deep faith in language and form, the poems here, perceptive and lyrical, forgo amnesia in favor of a perpetual light, and what Hearon devastatingly uncovers is nothing less than our brutal past, and yes, the paucity of our humanity. Yet Crows in Eden has within its vision that city on the hill, some future America, sustained by moral and just measures of sound and fury.” — Major Jackson