This essay explores how poets respond to the re:memory project of slavery and its many refracted afterlives. Can a resurrectionary poetics stitch the ephemerality and partiality of Black pasts into a quilt of recovery? This essay suggests that Black poets join historians in employing “new methodologies that disrupt” and enlarge “conventional historical processes and methods,” to extend from Marisa Fuentes. In their ongoing turns to the past, such poets resurrect disremembered histories, demonstrating how poetry can burst past history’s (archival and methodological) boundaries to offer both new work and methods that influence public memory. In its focus on Tiana Clark’s “Conversations with Phillis Wheatley” poems in her debut collection, I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood (2018), this piece examines how Clark is in conversation with Wheatley and also with scholars who engage (spiritual and theoretical) space that holds both missing and surviving historical remnants. Finally, this essay is a meditation on Black loss and longing. What’s missing in the archives of Black history is an endless series of lost and unpreserved papers and missing objects. For Black communities, “missing” is not only items that weren’t preserved in repositories; what’s missing is also archival ache and historical longing over time.

Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South.Using theFifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.