ABOUT THIS BOOK

Inspired by actual case histories of long-term missing African American children, this provocative and heartrending collection of poems evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in contemporary America. This thought-provoking collection of persona poems looks at absence from the standpoint of the witnesses surrounding the void and offers an intimate depiction of those impossible moments of aftermath lived by those who remain accounted for and present. While enabling us to question our own sense of identity, this unique collection of poems reveals the blurred edges of separation between them and us and the impact that the missing have upon our present and future.

Finalist, NAACP Image Awards

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is associate professor of English and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Adelphi University. She is author of the poetry collection Gravity, U.S.A. and the novel In the Arms of One Who Loves Me. Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mythium, and RATTLE.

REVIEWS

“The persons ‘last seen’ in Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s beautifully haunting book include missing children the poet has researched and imagined and a young woman whose apparent leap off the Bay Bridge is at the center of ‘The San Francisco Sonnets.’ These absences, explored through a variety of formal strategies and peripheral perspectives, are echoed in fragments from the life of an elusive ‘you,’ and inform even the momentary joys of the abecedarian ‘Boy Met Girl’ poems. In their powerful tension between absence and presence, between broken narrative and richly detailed lyric, LaMon’s poetic sequences put all our assumptions about stability and permanence into question.”—Martha Collins, author of Blue Front

“At the heart of Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s new collection Last Seen is a haunting series of poems born of the silence tragedy and loss wedges into our lives. With restraint and through a variety of characters, LaMon gives voice to those whose voices have been lost to us, who’ve left behind only questions and vivid empty spaces the way a boy, dragging his foot, leaves a trace to follow, fleeting as a ‘mark in the snow.’”—Natasha Tretheway, author of Native Guard

“The most disturbing poetics of loss is often the most valuable, beautiful, and lethal. Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s Last Seen, winner of the 2011 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, is a deeply crafted sequence of poems about long-missing African American children in the US. LaMon is a master of the persona poem, where the voices of children, parents, abductors, and friends interact as each tale is revealed. Most poems are built in one single, long stanza, which adds to the tension and drama described. The result is a work in which multiple worlds of love and yearning become one large canvas of intimate humanity.”—The Bloomsbury Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Polygraph: The Control Questions

Who are you and whom do you love?

Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

How will you begin?

How will you live now?

What is the shape of your body?

Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?

The Elsewhere Chronicles

Preface

Mrs. Minor Gives Directions to Strangers

Two Waffles and a Tall Glass of Milk

The Clairvoyant Channels Clea Hall

Florida Keys Unidentified

Ten Items or Less

The Age-Progression Artist Pencils Thicker Lashes

A Suspect Mother Answers during Polygraph

"Let Me Run Upstairs and Get My Purse . . ."

Back Roads

How the Bryant Boy Will Know

The Facial Reconstructionist Has Cocktails with the Girls

Inheritance

Loony Toons

Last Seen

The Network News Director Addresses His Process of Selection

For My Husband: Who Took Our Daughter to the Park So I Could Get Some Rest, Then Fell Asleep and Awakened to an Empty Stroller

Boy Met Girl

At the Carnival, Near Prospect Park

Through a Mutual Friend

At Lance and Carol's Wedding

In July, at Nathan's Clam Bar

On the Tennis Courts

At B. Altman's Department Store

On the Subway

At Rockaway Beach, in Late June

At Claire's Father's Funeral

The San Francisco Sonnets

The Taker Returns from a Ten-Minute Break

San Francisco Bridge Suicide Jumper Considers Relativity

The Missing Girl's Sister

Prom King Goes Stag His Senior Year

The Junior Detective's Wife Speaks Out on the Day of Their Divorce

The Missing Girl's Mother

Priest Refuses Comment on Accident Driver's Acquittal

Olympic Hopeful Assesses Her Victory

The Missing Girl's Cousin

The Present Song of Seagulls on the San Francisco Bay

The Missing Girl's Boyfriend

The Teacher Prepares the Crisis Counseling Team

Couple Tours Alcatraz on Their Silver Anniversary

The Missing Girl's Father

Polygraph: The Guilty Knowledge Test

. . .

What do you remember about the earth?

What are the consequences of silence?

Tell me what you know about dismemberment

Describe a morning you woke without fear

And what would you say if you could?

How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

Note

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