You Haven't Asked about My Wedding or What I Wore: Poems of Courtship on the North American Frontier

During more than thirty years of reading reminiscences, diaries, and letters of forgotten North American pioneer women, poet Jana Harris noticed one narrative recurring time and again: the most powerful memory these women had was often either their courtship and wedding, or the courtship and wedding of a family member. While these young women, who most likely hauled water in a wooden bucket from creek to house and then wore her knees raw scrubbing splintery floors (if she was lucky enough to live in a home that had a floor), dreamed of a fine wedding, it was sometimes with a man they hardly knew.Harris captures the hope, anxiety, anger, and despair of these women through a variety of voices and poetic strategies. Based on interviews of 19th century frontier women conducted during the 1920 s and 30 s, the voices and images of these powerful women speak: Nowhere / on these parchment leaves do I find /myself, my likeness, my name, / not a whisper "Cynthia" not one / breath of me. Sculpted out of years of research and accompanied by archival photographs, these poems imagine the memoirs of forgotten frontier women and children. "