Marilyn Nelson

 Last night I went to a reading being given by Marilyn Nelson, a well-known poet who has published numerous volumes of poetry and who, from 2001-2006, was poet laureate of Connecticut.

In short, the reading was amazing. I left the reading really inspired and excited about the poetry she'd read. One poem she read is still unpublished, about two women, Millie and Christine, who were conjoined twins born in 1851-- she said she found this story while digging through the National Archives. I'm looking forward to seeing it in print and experiencing it again.

My favorite set of poems that she read came from her book Fortune's Bones. Essentially, they tell the story of a skeleton that, up until the 1970s, hung in the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT. In the 1990s the museum commissioned a forensic team to research the history of this skeleton and its provenance. What they found was that the bones were from a slave who lived around 1745 and who worked for a doctor who worked as a bonesetter. When the slave died, the doctor dissected him and prepared the bones for display in his house for educational purposes. The series of poems in the book tell this story from a range of perspectives, and they are really astonishing. I would highly recommend this book--check it out from your library or purchase it.

The final set of poems she read came from a book called Sweethearts of Rhythm (which was illustrated by Jerry Pinckney, who won a Caldecott Medal for The Lion and the Mouse). Anyway, this set of poems draws inspiration from a multiracial all-female touring band during the 1930s and 40s and the poems are all written from the instruments' perspectives.