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Martha Collins on Danielle Legros Georges:

When Danielle Legros Georges passed away in February 2025, she had completed the chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England and approved the final text for publication by Staircase Books. She didn’t live to see the published work, which will receive its launch at the Boston Public Library on June 10, or to see this issue of Plume, which features two poems that appear in it. As her friend and an avid reader of her poems, I’m deeply grateful to Plume for publishing the poems here.

In 2023, Danielle received a fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, for the purpose of researching Acts of Resistance, which she defined as “a series of poems about Black self-determinism and articulations of freedom within and against the context of Northern slavery.” For many weeks, Danielle took the train from her home in Boston to Worcester, where she did much of the research that led to the poems. “Mem and the Question of Mother Love” (in this issue) notes that the legal case at the center of the poem was “all over the local papers.” Danielle read those papers in the Antiquarian Society, and much more besides. These poems and others like them represent Danielle’s radical transformative act of turning historical material into memorable poems.

Sara London on “Horse in Snow”

I wrote an early draft of this poem during the pandemic. I was driving from my former hometown of Burlington, Vermont, to my home in western Massachusetts. The world was on pause. It was cold and snowy, and I was passing through a rural stretch of nearly purgatorial whiteness. When I spotted that horse, I think I was ripe for the kind of magnetism it proffered. The image resonated as some kind of redeemable truth at a time when so much seemed to be slipping permanently into the rearview. That dignified equine profile imprinted itself on my mind, and summoned that other “gift” of Trojan lore — though this New England nag was the purer country cousin, a clear antagonist to tricks and treachery. In my sorrowful mood, I’d gained a companion of sorts. The poem went through revisions for a while, and when I eventually came to see that tail as a “tired flag / wild rag,” I felt I’d arrived at a more precise and impactful meaning. The poem helped me express deep mourning for our nation; those “boundary lines” — our sad divide — haunted me then, and unsettle me even more today.

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