During more than thirty years of reading reminiscences, diaries, and letters of forgotten North American pioneer women, poet Jana Harris noticed one narrative recurring time and again: the most powerful memory these women had was often either their courtship and wedding, or the courtship and wedding of a family member. While these young women, who most likely hauled water in a wooden bucket from creek to house and then wore her knees raw scrubbing splintery floors (if she was lucky enough to live in a home that had a floor), dreamed of a fine wedding, it was sometimes with a man they hardly knew.
Harris captures the hope, anxiety, anger, and despair of these women through a variety of voices and poetic strategies. Based on interviews of 19th century frontier women conducted during the 1920’s and 30’s, the voices—and images—of these powerful women speak:
“Nowhere / on these parchment leaves do I find /
myself, my likeness, my name, / not a whisper—Cynthia—not one / breath of me.”
Sculpted out of years of research and accompanied by archival photographs, these poems imagine the memoirs of forgotten frontier women and children.
