Ransom Street is Claire Millikin’s third collection of poetry with 2Leaf Press. The poems in this volume meditate on the idea of ransom to explore legacies of violence in the southeastern United States, ultimately seeking moments of reckoning for these unsettled histories. A fee paid to release a prisoner, ransom can, Millikin shows us, initiate a sacrificial act that drives people apart, but also, when paid, can bring the homeless home. The poems in Ransom Street move through the question of release elliptically, exploring these abstract implications of ransom through a fictional street in a southeastern American town. The presence of inherited violence, cultural and familial, haunt the terrain of Ransom Street, as the poems move through a geography of ghosts, always seeking “ransom,” the sacrificial act that returns the self to wholeness.
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