Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound

by Crystal Simone Smith

Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection, Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these poems, fugitive persons evade slave patrol hounds by climbing magnolia trees, use the cover of night and the detritus of a shipwreck to swim to freedom, and find temporary refuge in a cabin where a woman offers bread and water. Throughout, Smith poignantly envisions their flights to freedom—passages that were fueled by love, hope, and impossible dreams. She unceasingly gives voice to those who found courage in both bondage and freedom. In Runagate, the enslaved regain their stories and return to the sensory world.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published May 16, 2025

Reviews

[Jerome Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crucial collection I so hope is widely read, could serve consequentially being taught in classrooms and exposed to as many appreciating readers as possible! Crystal has carefully crafted a powerful volume which well exemplifies the rich capabilities of haikai as a valuable tool for examination, processing, and engaging with troubling history, and a valuable means of understanding and informing our present, providing moving insights to appreciate how we arrived here, and what we might do to continue to improve on glaring missteps and prevent detrimental patterns from continuation or resurgence. One of the most pivotal and significant literary contributions, in Japanese inspired forms and more generally, which one may discover in our time, absolutely on par with contemporary phenoms and in solidarity and resonance with the most germane and pressing missions of this millenia, that I hope will be recognized and remembered in the same highest canon alongside other essential entries both in haiku, senryu, and tanka (of which this collection is particularly valuable being such a traditionally colonial, sanitized and defanged form in its depoliticized English applications as a rule) such as Million Shadows At Noon, This Other World, Afriku, and in the larger poetic hemispheres where it courageously accepts, carries, and passes the torch from such phenomenal predecessors as Etched in Clay, Emmett Till In Different States, and seminal Hill We Climb, from a laureate whose recent untitled piece on events in Minneapolis proves Simone Smith's urgent concerns are anything but past or buried. A truly shining example of the integral profound practical and didactic uses a micropoem can have in qualified, thoughtful hands, to enhance empathy, generate awareness, spark change and provide hope for the better world possible, visibly within reach. An enormous pleasure to see these types of instrumental projects contributing meaningfully to the best causes possible!

* oh, context to a favorite tanka in there, per Denise Alvarado: " When the head of a household dies, someone must go and inform the bees, otherwise they will leave or die." 🙏❤️🕯️

[Zander Bautz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good!