Negro Mountain

"Negro Mountain is the name of a ridge in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania--its summit is in fact the highest elevation in the state. Named for a Black man who was killed fighting on the side of his white masters against Indigenous peoples during a scouting expedition to the region in the mid-eighteenth century, this mountain ridge is also the metaphorical center of C. S. Giscombe's sixth full-length book of poetry. Negro Mountain is a subtle, erudite interrogation of the contact zones where Blackness, white supremacy, Indigeneity, and endangered animal populations enter into complex and multifaceted dialectics of survival and erasure. From the vantage of this ridge, Giscombe maps the psychogeography of surrounding region and the tangled human and nonhuman forces that have shaped it. To say that such work is strictly 'regional, ' however, is to underestimate Giscombe's commitment to and deep engagement with the archive, and his poetry deftly connects relevant points across time and space, from the mid-Pleistocene period to nineteenth-century Jamaica to the vilest corners of the internet. This saturation of sources, voices, and modes yields a parallax synthesis of the personal and the historical-all filtered through the singular voice of a poet who has been honing his craft for decades"--