Thanks to NetGalley and Liveright for the ARC!

Reading Frank X. Walker’s Load in Nine Times feels akin to walking through a great museum gallery—you know you won’t get everything the first time around, but it’s so good that you start planning your next trip before you’ve even finished.

I currently live in Kentucky. It’s a weird place because it feels littered with the bones of slavery, but it seems like longtime residents are quick to look past that or find alternate explanations. There’s just a whole history to talk around. Walker chooses instead to let this history talk.

Load in Nine Times feels like a rebuttal to the tendency to romanticize the lives of emancipated soldiers. While Walker celebrates their heroism, he also acknowledges a complicated reality—if one is freed into violence, what does that say about our understanding of freedom? In “Unsalted,” the speaker says, “Marvel at how valiantly untrained men die.” These poems confidently explore all the hypocrisy implicit in the space between emancipation and true freedom, and Walker thoughtfully interrogates Kentucky’s resistance to upending a culture built on the backs of enslaved individuals. 

I frequently find myself struggling with historical poetry because it often sprawls out of the poet’s control, but Walker never allows that to happen, writing with an accessible style that encourages readers to look beyond the book. This is an incredibly well-researched collection, characterized by polyvocality—almost every poem is biographical in some capacity, and I found myself googling whatever I could find about each individual. It’s a wonderful set of poems because the poems aren’t the point, which makes it feel perfect for, say, a high school or college class because it seems so carefully designed to generate discussion. 

All in all, this is an excellent book, and it's one I'm excited to share with others.