Persons Unknown

by Jake Adam York

In this stunning continuation to the poetry collection A Murmuration of Starlings, dedicated to those who lost their lives during the Civil Rights movement, Jake Adam York presents another set of searing portraits of these martyrs—men whose murders haunt America’s history. These elegiac and documentary poems seek justice and understanding for such sacrifices as Mack Charles Parker, lynched in Mississippi in 1959, his body disposed of in the waters of the Pearl River; Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, abducted into the depths of the Homochitto Forest, beaten, and drowned in the Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan; and Medgar Evers, dedicated activist, whose assassination outside his home in 1963 sent shockwaves throughout the South. Drawing on photographs, articles, legal documents, and other cultural artifacts, York deftly weaves history and memory into a lyrical reckoning for these often-overlooked victims of the bitter struggle for Civil Rights.
A Natural History of Mississippi


A blade of rust from the ocean


and from the air a rumor


that corrodes the earth in tongues,


lichen, moss, magnolia,


until each gossip’s true.


Things go this way,


each green repeating its fact


of sun and wind and rain,


its dialect, its blade,


while beneath each leaf


a quiet cuts between the veins.


Laced, pale wings open


to learn the particular weather,


the place or part of speech


that will darken


and give them a name.


So each sugar furls


to burn and bitter


against whatever mouths


might swallow,


each skin becomes


the history of its harbor,


another word for here.


This hatch of bark and shade


hangs like a photograph


of all it covers, so perfect,


so still, its edges


blur, then disappear.

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 22, 2010

About the author

Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge’s Prize, A Murmuration of Starlings, selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2008), and Persons Unknown, forthcoming as an Editor's Selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2010).

His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.