Habeas Corpus

Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave who poisoned her master. A serial killer, a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity. The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed, and lethally injected; the last to be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough gives us fifty sonnets, each about a legal execution in American history. From four hundred years of documentation she conjures – and honors – a chorus of the dead. The sonnets, headed meticulously by name, date, and place, are poignant with the factual, with words and actions reported by eyewitnesses and spoken by the condemned – so limpidly framed that at moments one forgets the skill that tautens and crystallizes all this into authentic poetry: The warehouse was dingy, cluttered with lumber: thirteen steps, noose, black mask. No hymn, no psalm. He spat out his gum in the chaplain’s outstretched palm. Habeas Corpus: you have the body. With a rare control of indignation by sorrow, of subjectivity by the subject’s own truth, McDonough’s unsparing sonnets reveal the enormity that is the death penalty in America: “a ladder, a hanging tree” for Mary Dyer, “an odor he'd/described in print as peach blossoms, sickening-sweet” for Caryl Chessman, “a hood, their/target, then bang, bang, bang, three noises, quick” for Gary Gilmore, “Two needles in his arm,/blood splatters on the sheet” for Charles Brooks. Taking the words of fifty out of the nearly 20,000 men and women executed since 1608, she reflects them back to us in works of self-effacing artistry. Resurrected from their obscurity these individuals speak our secret history.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Early 1608: George Kendall October 22, 1659: Mary Dyer June 1, 1660: Mary Dyer July 19, 1692: Susanna Martin June 4, 1715: Margaret Gaulacher July 12, 1726: William Fly February 25, 1755: Tom, a Negro September 18, 1755: Mark and Phillis October 21, 1773: Levi Ames April 11, 1778: Aaaran October 8, 1789: Rachel Wall July 8, 1797: Abraham Johnstone July 9, 1819: Rose Butler April 25, 1822: Samuel Green April 22, 1831: Charles Gibbs November 11, 1831: Nat Turner January 31, 1850: Reuben Dunbar August 30, 1850: Professor John W. Webster December 2, 1859: John Brown December 26, 1862: Chaska June 19, 1863: Private William Grover April 22, 1864: Corporal William B. Jones July 7, 1865: Mary Eugenia Surratt November 10, 1865: Major Henry Wirz December 12, 1884: George Cooke August 6, 1890: William Kemmler June 28, 1895: Michael McDonough October 29, 1901: Leon Czolgosz June 9, 1916: Juan Sanchez February 8, 1924: Gee Jon August 23, 1927: Nicola Sacco August 23, 1927: Bartolomeo Vanzetti August 14, 1936: Rainey Bethea January 31, 1945: Private Eddie D. Slovik May 3, 1946: Willie Francis May 9, 1947: Willie Francis June 19, 1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg May 2, 1960: Caryl Chessman April 14, 1965: Perry Smith January 17, 1977: Gary Gilmore December 7, 1982: Charles Brooks April 16, 1986: Daniel Morris Thomas May 21, 1997: Bruce Edwin Callins June 22, 2000: Gary Graham, later known as Shaka Sankofa August 9, 2000: Brian Roberson August 9, 2000: Oliver Cruz June 11, 2001: Timothy McVeigh October 9, 2002: Aileen Wuornos September 3, 2003: Paul Hill May 13, 2005: Michael Ross Notes