Sans political or cultural agenda, Spaar’s volume is a poetic project not a scholarly or historical one. She stepped into Thomas Jefferson’s orbit in 1974, when she entered the University of
Virginia, a move that brought her just across the river from Jefferson’s birthplace of Shadwell. She notes that polarized and oversimplified responses to Jefferson and his paradoxes are not
just local. Jefferson’s struggles in his own time endure with regard to the limits and reach of the federal government (and the country’s citizens) on matters of economics, war, gender, and
religious and personal freedom. She hopes that her anthology of twentieth and twenty-first-century poems about Thomas Jefferson makes a new and unique contribution to the ongoing conversations
for Americans. There are 50 poems with an afterword, and notes on contributors and commentary. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
