Saturday Review: “‘Sweet Sweat’ and ‘Plainsongs’: The Lyrical Reclamation of Place,” a review by Annie Woodford of Forrest Rapier’s As the Den Burns (2022) and Jacinta V. White’s Resurrecting the Bones: Born from a Journey through African American Churches & Cemeteries in the Rural South (2019), in NCLR Online Winter 2026
Annie Woodford reviews Forrest Rapier’s poetry collection As the Den Burns, describing it as “a deeply intimate, exuberant history that marries the origins of language and pain and magic” while reflecting the “hallucinatory beauty and sickness of the South, of capitalism, of America.” Each poem is a celebration of language, in addition to being an homage to Rapier’s home state (Florida). Rapier combines old language with the new as he tells the stories of the dead.
Woodford also reviews Jacinta V. White’s collection of poems, Resurrecting the Bones, making note of its “fusion of religion, history, geography, and suffering.” In the making of this book, White traveled through the South, visiting a variety of African American churches and cemeteries, in search of a deeper level of understanding. Woodford describes her journey as a “spiritual quest . . . to understand the South as a macrocosm of the larger national character.”
According to Woodford, these collections are “potent examinations of language as the medium between place and myth.” Both Rapier and White make intentional use of Southern language and natural imagery to depict the sanctity of place.
Read the entire review here and buy a copy of As the Den Burns and Resurrecting the Bones from your local independent bookstore or Bookshop.org.
