The crucial questions of racism, labor rights, and wealth-and their complex and undeniable connections are taken up by LOOM. Kevin Gallagher’s poems are excavations and reclamations of difficult American history, elucidating prismatically the voices and sites of collusion in and resistance to the construction of our nation’s greatest institutions and our nation’s most awful crimes.
-Danielle Legros Georges, poet laureate of Boston
“Kevin Gallagher, in his new book Loom, searches through these Massachusetts mill roots and unmasks the little-known unholy alliance between capitalists of the North and slavers of the South. Gallagher does this by resurrecting a public genre of narrative poetry and then uses it to impart prosaic information (in this case history) with an effective didactic force. Aside from mnemonic considerations, verse employed in this way by a skilled poet can effectively direct emphasis and insert emotion like no prose piece can. And Gallagher is nothing if not a skilled poet.”
– Doug Holder, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Read the full LOOM review here.
