Long before we are born our lives begin to take shape. Our existence hardly a speck in someone’s imagination and yet the foundations are already being laid, the support beams which we will alternatively seek shelter, solace, and fight against are being driven into the ground. Such is the background of the poetry collection “the heiress/ghost acres”: what do we do with our familial lineage? What do we do with all of that baggage and how it has shaped the world in which we live today?

The writer Lightsey Darst struggles with this history, both familial and national, and her interrogation of the past may very well be summed up by the question: how are we supposed to be something other than ourselves? In “Education of an Heiress,” Darst declares, “I’m a self, not a stem, not a passage through” and yet the past remains, lingering and reaffirmed with the startling similarity between the poet and her predecessor. 

The only possible answer, the only way forward is to flip the whole thing on its head. Play with it. Turn it on its side, which is exactly and literally what Darst does. Halfway through the collection, into the “Ghost Acres” section, the poems shift from the familiar left-to-right format to one where the words move up the page, or force you to turn the book sideways. “[H]e wanted something eerie to happen, something from the other side./So okay, now I am on the other side.”

~ Nicholas Grosso, Sabrina Morreale, Lorenzo Perri, curators ABF 2023.