“How can one fill in the gaps of a family history? The history that resists the dry ink of records, newspapers, headstones, and maybe even escapes the juice of oral history and diaries. How can we imagine the complexity of an ancestor’s struggle and paradoxes? In Descent, the very talented poet Lauren Russell shows us how to write what we do not know; to give with grace and dignity, humanity to names on the family tree. Descent is a search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (BRENDA COULTAS) “‘I am a poet. I am not a historian.’ Thus Lauren Russell’s biomythographic (say: “Lorde”) reckoning with the past passes into a gap that’s the missing words of a newly freedwoman, a Pittsburgh bed now absent a lover, a dug up grave. What Russell makes of what she finds missing is her Descent, an audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering that asks, what do we demand of the past, and what to do with its refusal? Russell’s deep archive would not answer her back. With Descent, however, she speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (DOUGLAS KEARNEY) “In Descent, Lauren Russell’s stellar new book-length poem, stories, told by family, archives, history itself, create a chorus to portray a rich, Black American ancestral record. Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (JOHN KEENE)