Whitewash

Whitewash, by Frances Victory Schenkkan

Whitewash explores the civil rights era and its lingering tensions in Shreveport, Louisiana. Narrative and lyrical poetry weave an intricate collection of voices struggling to come to terms with racism, complicity, and hypocrisy. Deeply researched, Frances Victory Schenkkan’s poems also confront her own religious and family histories alongside these portraits of a fractured city—layering them into a broader examination of the ways that American culture, like The Great Raft that once stymied Shreveport growth, still bears many griefs in need of healing.

Frances Victory Schenkkan is the author of Mr. Stevens’ Secretary (University of Arkansas Press). A National Poetry Series finalist, her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, POOL, and Third Coast, among others. She lives in Austin.

Praise for Whitewash

“Frances Victory Schenkkan’s Whitewash confronts its complex shames and
complicated confessions with an imaginative resolve. The power of documentary
poetics makes these poems sing a new liturgy for old Louisiana, for
the poet’s own Shreveport, and for a history that’s difficult to face. Poem
after poem turns toward various personas caught in the rationalization of
complicity, the beauty of landscape, and the mythos each family makes. To
say Schenkkan’s stellar poems reckon with history isn’t enough, because every
line seeks to ‘burst out, into the grievous streets.’”

—Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty

“One of the heaviest lessons I’ve learned being born, raised, and living in
Louisiana my whole life is just how much we all bear the weight of our collective
past—all the injustices, poor decisions, and misheld traditions we carry
into today. Our statues, our street names, our prom pictures taken in front
of crumbling plantations—there are living reminders everywhere. Seeing it
all for exactly what it is, then and now, is the first important step toward a
better tomorrow here. Frances Victory Schenkkan’s new collection, Whitewash,
helps us do exactly that by shining the clearest of lights on the history we
share, the memories we hold dear, and this place we call home. Line by line,
Schenkkan offers family histories, cultural memories, and hard truths we need
to move forward. And while these poems cannot right wrongs, nor can they
repay debts, they do their absolute best to deliver the gifts only honesty and
clarity can give. For those gifts, I am tremendously grateful.”

—Jack B. Bedell, author of Ghost Forest,
Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017–2019

“Whitewash navigates the multidimensional tensions between poverty, place,
and race. In Schenkkan’s rich and reaching poems, we are made to confront
the intricate and even convoluted realities of racism and complicity without
escape and without the possibility of transcendence save for the abundant
voice and lyricism pressed upon a physical and psychological landscape and
narrative history. These poems offer an opportunity to participate in a social
context that can (re)shape what we think of now as historical experience even
as we relive so much of this book’s emotional tension and tenor today. This
is an ambitious collection. Impeccably researched and passionately nuanced,
these are poems that demand we contemplate all that frames how we memorialize
the past’s erased sins and troubled beauty that weighs upon us all.”

—Joshua Robbins, author of Eschatology in Crayon Wax

Details:

• Publication date: October 29, 2024
  
• Trim size: 6 x 9 in
• 978-1-960215-25-3

Looking for more Belle Point poetry? Check out our 2024 bundle!