CHATTEL
Book Info
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Paperback, 44 pages
Order Now Praise for Clifford Bernier & Chattel
In poems that gather force like waves before an approaching storm, Clifford Bernier’s Chattel documents and probes the practice of human bondage and forced labor across the globe and throughout history, from ancient Babylon, China, and the Khmer Empire to the more familiar Africa, Brazil, and Virginia. The reportorial voice—informed, authoritative, creditable—is implicit with irony and outrage, and historical figures like Nat Turner, Harriett Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth speak for themselves. The style is rich with detail. Exotic names of tribes and colonizers, historic dates, lists of commodities produced by slaves crowd forward and strain syntax, like subterranean truth that will out, but the effect is consistently clear and powerful. Over and over, the poems repay the attention they command.
—Harry Moore, author of We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner
In his powerful new chapbook Chattel, Clifford Bernier uses world history and persona to describe our turbulent past with slavery. “In the Dismal Swamp we are all slaves/of Gilgamesh,” the opening poem boldly claims, “Turtles on dry logs, rat/snakes on the trail.” It may be challenging to fully identify with some of the speakers of these poems, but Bernier’s writing style fixes your gaze when you feel you’re meant to look away. He provides no respite. Each poem jerks the eyes open and implores them to remain wide. Some of Bernier’s persona poems give Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and even Nat Turner a voice. “…[W]e murdered them all/while they slept, climbed/Blunt’s house to Jerusalem/and the Kingdom of Heaven,” Nat says, “where I hung from the neck//until dead.” As readers journey through Chattel they’ll wonder intently: Do I believe in good? In ghosts? In redemption?
—Alison Palmer, author of The Offing