Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

220 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Book Reviews
their lives. In the final line of the opening story, “Not People, Not This,”
she writes about the way people “understand more about each other
than, maybe, we ever want to admit,” which may well serve as a thesis
for her entire collection. More often than not, Kelly Magee’s stories live
up to the promise of that thesis.
—Reviewed by Shanie Latham
Francis, Vievee, Blue-Tail Fly. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 2006, 77 pages, $14.95.
In her first collection of poetry, Blue-Tail Fly, Vievee Francis takes her
readers on a journey down cobbled roads and dirt paths of the past,
successfully transporting us to the days from slavery to manumission
and the immense hardships of the Civil War era. She breathes life into
what are often thought of as simpler yet conflicted times, resurrecting
the authenticity of attitudes and language which echo through to the
present. Her choir of voices captures personas from slave to politician,
soldier to mother, none of whom were left untouched by the volatile
events of the day.
Francis presents arguments and motivations from both sides of
war. She details pro-war sentiments in “Ample Cause of War,” written
from the point of view of President Polk, and “General Taylor Convinces
Himself That He Is For War.” Non-violent desires are expressed in a
plea for protests against atrocities in “Fredrick Douglass Speaks before
the Anti-Mexican War Abolitionists.”
One of the most compelling works is “The Binding Tie,” a series of
seven sonnets inspired by stories told to the author by her grandmother
depicting actual recollections of her great-great-grandmother, an exslave
who illegally married an Irishman. The couple fled Mississippi
for the forests of eastern Texas, and the poems are a call and response
between Callie’s point of view and Andrew’s. The following lines
explore a sense of Callie’s newfound freedom within her relationship
to Andrew, illustrating a stark contrast between forced possession of a
woman in bondage to the willing posssession of a wife in love:
I’m free—I’m his. We find ourselves rolled up
like good corn biscuits come daybreak.
He smells sweet and sour as buttermilk—
a scent my woolen plaits seem made to sop.