Martin J. Levine reviews
Boneyarn
by David Mills

In 1991, workers excavating land in lower Manhattan discovered the remains of 419 free and enslaved Africans, part of a burial ground for thousands, its very existence having been forgotten until that discovery.

The final, and in some ways most terrible, indignity those buried there suffered was the robbery of their memory. David Mills, in his poetry collection Boneyarn, takes a valiant step toward restoring it. Mills has pieced together from the conclusions of scholars, historical records of the community, and his own imagination, vivid portraits of some of those people. In “To the Bones: About the Beads: Talking,” he extrapolates from the 110 beads found with one set of remains the memory of the respect their owner held in Africa, retained during her servitude. In “Which/One,” Mills considers that the names of two women hanged for rebellion are known, but not which one was temporarily reprieved until the child she carried was born.

Boneyarn is sometimes gut-wrenching, but always moving, and is an important document of the lives of many who were too long forgotten.

David Mills is the author of The Sudden Country and The Dream Detective. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The American Antiquarian Society, and The Queens Council on the Arts.

Martin J. Levine’s poetry has been anthologized in the book It Is the Poem Sing into Your Eyes, published in Measure magazine, and featured on WBAI radio.