Savage Conversations
Published on 21. March 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
144 pages
978-1-56689-531-6 (ISBN)
Description
The 1862 mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota nightly haunts Mary Todd Lincoln, institutionalized and alone with her ghosts.
May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln's claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events-until now. Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.
May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln's claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events-until now. Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for Savage Conversations"Howe's drama taps emotional undercurrents that course imperceptibly through conventional historical narratives." -Publishers Weekly
"This lucid collection ingeniously examines the deep and sordid layers of complicity." -The Star Tribune
"I left the story with a deep sense of gratitude for Howe's dedication to complexity and nuance." -The Paris Review Daily
"A play/poem/novel/historical nightmare, Howe mixes disparate textual, visual, and genre techniques to create something absolutely singular and haunting." -The Literary Hub
"Perhaps the real ghosts here are in Howe's portrayals of presidential power, the treatment of marginalized bodies, the erasure of shameful stories in favor of those that glorify a man and a nation; historical relics and monuments and walls, sanity and control-these are still what haunt us." -The Poetry Foundation
"Savage Conversations radically ups the ante in characterizing Mary Todd Lincoln, imbuing her with malice and poetry." -Foreword Reviews
"In reading this, I was blown away. Unmoored. Sent spiraling adrift on gusts of wind." -Rachel S, Harvard Book Store
"Part fever dream, part extended meditation on madness, Howe's Savage Conversations is a bracing commentary on the nature of guilt and grief." -The Historical Novel Society
"Savage Conversations takes place somewhere in between its sources, between sanity and madness, between then and now, between the living and the dead. It pushes past the limitations of textual sources for telling indigenous history and accounts of insanity." -Barrelhouse Reviews
"An eerie mash-up that ties President Lincoln's mass 1862 execution of 38 Dakota warriors to the hallucinations of Mary Todd Lincoln." -City Pulse
"LeAnne Howe's words are to savor, contemplate, and horrify. Savage Conversations explodes with the stench of guilt and insanity that undergirds the American story, whispered through a personal, familial, national, and supernatural drama revelatory in every sense." -Philip J. Deloria
"LeAnne Howe's play Savage Conversations activates this space in history. She fills the wide-open gaps with a narrative of 'what could have been,' makes the absences present in very intimate ways." -Full Stop
"Savage Conversations invokes our own racial conflict and probes America's psyche, its struggle to reconcile its colonialist values, indeed its white supremacy, with its multi-ethnic cultures and populations." -On the Seawall
"In the wake of recent movements to remove Confederate monuments as we work to present the truths of history, Howe's book directs our attention to a violent event that has not been adequately acknowledged. Through experimental form, Howe refracts a moment of history that readers simply cannot forget, that they will inevitably carry with them long after reading the last page." -The Carolina Quarterly
"This is a haunted poem. Howe gives us voices intimate, twisted, and deluded-and yet relentlessly exact. Inside this drama in verse, a seething history uncoils. But do we meet a mad woman's fantasy or someone more real?" -Heid Erdrich
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
MN
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 186 mm
Width: 124 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
142 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56689-531-6 (9781566895316)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
LeAnne Howe (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and filmmaker. Her most recent book, Choctalking on Other Realities, won the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. She is the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature in English at the University of Georgia, Athens.