runagate: a runaway; fugitive or deserter; a person who drifts or wanders about; vagabond.
Crystal Simone Smith’s Runagateis a collection of haiku and tanka, presented singly and in sequences, written in response to runaway slave ads and post-Civil War slave narratives. This book is a singular achievement by one of our best poets.
It is also a powerful collaboration between the poet, her colleagues who helped with the manuscript, the documentarians who collected the advertisements and narratives, and the ancestors who lived these stories and passed them on to us.
