Midden

Poets Out Loud

by Julia Bouwsma, Afaa Michael Weaver (Foreword)

SELECTED AS ONE OF NPR'S 2018 GREAT READS!

ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S 50 MUST READ POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2019!

In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-five people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Though Malaga had been their home for generations, nine residents (including the entire Marks family) were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded in Pownal, Maine. The others struggled to find homes on other islands or on the mainland, where they were often unwelcome. The Malaga school was dismantled and rebuilt as a chapel on another island. Seventeen graves were exhumed from the Malaga cemetery, consolidated into five caskets, and reburied at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. Just one year after the start of the eviction proceedings, the Malaga community was erased.

Midden confronts the events and over one hundred years of silence that surround this shameful incident in Maine's history. Utilizing a wide range of poetic styles--epistolary poems to ghosts, persona poems, erasure poems, interior poems, interviews and instructions, poems framed both in the past and in the present--Midden delves into the vital connections between land, identity, and narrative and asks how we can heal the generations and legacies of damage that result when all three of these are deliberately taken in an attempt to rob people of their very humanity. The book is a poetic excavation of loss, a carving of the landscape of memory, and a reckoning with and tribute to the ghosts we carry and step over, often without our even knowing it.

Genres: Poetry, Historical, Fiction, Race, Historical Fiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2018

Reviews

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

"for every sorrow that's been dug from you,
here is a pile of rubble twice as high."
-- from "Midden"

A beautifully crafted collection. Until I had read this, I did not know the term documentary poetics. I feel inspired by Midden for a variety of reasons. First, the research that went into writing this collection is mesmerizing. Second, the marriage of fact and craft are so flawlessly done.

I first heard about the forceful eviction of an entire community of residents of Malaga Island last year when I read Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt. That was a wonderful historical fiction book (written with children in mind, but that doesn’t matter), and I wanted to learn more about Malaga Island. I listened to a WMPG-FM radio documentary on the subject, which was incredibly informative. Then I stumbled across this collection this past semester when I was curating a poetry collection for a collection development class I had taken. This thin seventy-four page collection is powerful: photographs, acknowledgements, wonderfully rendered poetry and all.

Julia Bouwsma writes about Malaga Island and its former residents, but she also tackles eugenics/racism, forced sterilizations, the insidiousness of people who simply stand by as atrocities unfurl or "are simply doing their jobs", the concept of ownership (of land, of oneself), the beauty and substance of simplicity or the quotidian, who is allowed to tell which stories, and (with a delicate subtleness) her own personal experiences as they relate to the people of Malaga.

From “Interview With the Dead:”

"What did you leave behind?

Our arms spread out around it all.
until our hands could not
meet our hands.”

Truly a phenomenal collection.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking- it left me knowing I'll read it over and over again so that I might absorb each story more fully. Bouwsma's clearly did her research and what stories she couldn't fully find, she filled in with her own imaginings. What a writer.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of poems and a compelling and empathetic account of the Malaga Island evictions. In the early twentieth century, there was a mixed-race community on Malaga Island on the coast of Maine and in 1912 the state of Maine forcibly evicted 45 people and committed nine residents to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. Bouwsma narrates this story in close, taking on the voices of several of the inhabitants and other people around them as well as her own. The sequence is intricately constructed, punctuated by poems whose titles begin "Dear ghosts," and which take the form of Bouwsma or some other modern speaker addressing the ghosts of the past--both of Malaga island and other dead (in her afterword, Bouwsma talks about how honoring the people of Malaga is tied up with her project to honor the dead in the cemetery she found on her farm). Every poem deepens the picture--this is the first work I've read about the Malaga Island eviction (and Bouwsma provides a hefty further reading list in her afterword) but I get a sense of who these people could have been as the book progresses.

The poems themselves were smart and ranged from straightforward lyric and narrative (like "Bas-Relief: Jake Marks" and "The Tray of Spades") to experimental movements (like "Sestina Fragments: Our Teacher Prays for Bread"). Both of these types were effective, so in "Bas-Relief: Jake Marks" we get "Whittle this man, cut him / from his landscape, cut him against it-- / they say he feared water but lived on an island" and it cuts into the reader from the rest of the poem. Conversely. "Sestina Fragments: Our Teacher Prays for Bread" is a little more difficult, but it also reaches out to us. (Unfortunately, I can't find a good way to represent it in the review since the spacing is important to the sense of fragmentation and construction that makes it so effective) I loved the whole book (although not as much as Work By Bloodlight which has some mystical elements that I really appreciated) but some of my favorite poems were those named, "Their Objects", "Agent Pease's Defense", and "Final Invocation for Ghosts".

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly courageous and thoroughly compelling investigation of the displaced people of Maine's Malaga Island. It is an investigation of race and power; it is a document of Maine's covered histories; it is an emotionally-charged organization of a people's attempted destruction. Having grown up in Maine but never known about the Malaga story, I'm grateful for encountering and exploring higher truths through Bouwsma's writing.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous, raw, intimate set of poems addressing a dark and important piece of history. Bouwsma has written a deeply-felt, evocative book that feels physical and personal. I also appreciated her thoughtful afterword, which shed additional light on her writing process, why this subject spoke to her, and her interrogation of her own privilege. Well worth a read.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything water touches becomes hemmed with mud. In this collection, an island, its people, are momentarily resurrected in snapshots akin to a slideshow in a museum of a historic atrocity—a wiping out of a people. At moments places you in all the discomfort of witnessing while at the same time implicating the viewer. Midden is an excellent study of the cruelty of our own histories.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and incredibly moving. A series of poems about Maine's shameful history with the people of Malaga island. Read this book.

[Tammi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of poems from a unique perspective.

[Philip Obaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly moving and informative, Bouwsma strikes a difficult balance of presenting and acknowledging the tragedy of Malaga Island while sharing her own perspective without feeling intrusive.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking, haunting - you must read - my words cannot begin to do it justice.

[megan donaldson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poignant, powerful and a reminder of a tragic and intentional and unforgivable act in Maine's history and the continued struggles againsts racial inequality.

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What you don’t know could build an island. What I don’t know could fill the sea.”