Ten books about history’s unsung legacies

Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in BOMB, The Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Electric Lit the author tagged ten books that "attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today." One title on the list:

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje

This “novel in verse” is about the titular Billy the Kid—a man who, despite seeming like someone out of a dime novel, was real. As a 19th century gunslinging outlaw, Billy is forever braided with ideas and American history. Ondaatje, inspired to push back against the glorification of the Wild West he encountered as a child reading comic books in Sri Lanka, wrote The Collected Works. He includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and interviews, as well as pages from those dime novels of his youth. Ondaatje’s poems are compressed, even restrained, against the expansiveness of his archival material. It is a stunning attempt to suss out who, exactly, was this living legend and how, as Ondaatje writes in his afterword, he was “turned into a cartoon.” Obdaatje explains, “I had to invent Billy from the ground up.” So Ondaatje gives us a man who catches a fly and holds the terrified buzz to his ear. “These are the killed,” Ondaatje’s Billy says before he lists those he murdered. “Blood a necklace on me all my life.”

Read about another book on Arterian's list.

--Marshal Zeringue