The Root Verse: A Legacy in Seven Poems - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

Before there was a story, there was a sound.

The Root Verse traces seven generations across Samaná, Dominican Republic, through poetry shaped by migration, language, memory, identity, and the things history does not always preserve whole.

Beginning with the 1824 migration of free African Americans to Hispaniola and moving across two centuries, each poem imagines a voice from a different generation. Names survive. Languages change. Songs lose words. Records disappear. Families remember differently. What remains is carried forward in fragments.

These poems do not attempt to turn every silence into an answer. Instead, they explore what it means to inherit questions alongside names, stories, photographs, songs, and places, and to discover that uncertainty does not make the past meaningless.

From Elijah Green’s arrival in 1824 to a thirteen-year-old Elijah Green II writing beside the water in 2038, The Root Verse becomes a meditation on belonging, preservation, and what one generation can leave for the next.

The characters and relationships are imagined. The history that inspired them is real.

A poetic companion to Samaná: Seven Generations, forthcoming from Livingston Press, and Story Letters from Samaná, The Root Verse stands at the lyrical heart of the Samaná story.

A name can survive.
A song can change.
A story can arrive in pieces
and still be worth carrying.

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