David Mills Poetry Reading 6/4/22 for Juneteenth in Kew Gardens

David Mills is an award winning writer and poet and we are excited to have him at Maple Grove on Sat. 6/4/22 at 1 PM. He will be reading from his poetry collection, Boneyarn, the first book of poems about slavery in New York City where the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the United States is located. David has also received a grant from Flushing Town Hall to write poems about a formerly enslaved woman, named Millie Tunnell, buried in Maple Grove Cemetery! Books will be available ($18) at a reception after the reading. About Boneyarn: With meticulous, lyrical courage, David Mills, with makes a verbal monument to the fifteen thousand enslaved bodies buried in New York City’s African Cemetery. It is a work that required tears to write and tears to read, for Mills dodges nothing and records all with style and dispatch: deprivation, torture, hunger, death, and, after death, desecration. Here is our nation’s hell, founded in the shadow of Wall Street. For the 419 bodies unearthed when the site was discovered, only one whole name was found. Mills responds with a vision of real individuals that recalls both the invention of Blake and the humanity of Langston Hughes. A poet of heroic empathy, if he is a virtuoso in making language come to life in many registers, the heart of the book arrives in tender and loving conversations with the bones and in homages to Boneyarn, America’s first black poets Jupiter Hammon (who was enslaved in New York) and Phyllis Wheatley. Read it again and again and do not forget. Boneyard is a brilliant, devastating, and important book: Boneyarn. -Rodney Jones, Kingsley Tuft Award winner