October 31, 2017 | Poetry | Paperback  
ISBN: 978-1945233012
Distributor: Stillhouse Press

Recitatif: a shift in operatic singing towards the rhythms of speech, calling attention to a narrative interlude.

Carmen Gillespie’s The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif interrupts the everyday to bring us the spiritual visitations of Sally Hemings, her half-sister Martha Wayles Jefferson, and other famed and forgotten residents of the Monticello plantation. These poems reach into the distant past to unearth songs of pain and longing, weighty with the long history of American silence that continues to circumscribe our lives today. Equal parts dirge and seance, this otherworldly walk through confines designed by the third president of the United States is an overdue re-envisioning of love, sex, and power at the roots of an incomplete democracy.