Some good collections of poetry dazzle the reader with their skill, or the emotional impact; some leave a mark. Walker's collection falls into that second category.

The voices in this collection of persona poems are haunting. From Medgar Evers, his wife Myrlie and brother Charles Evers to his murderer Byron de la Beckwith and his two ex-wives, Willie and Thelma, each poem captures a facet of the assassination and its aftermath.

Each poem also captures a facet of the fear that pervaded Mississippi. Walker pulls no punches. In a poem titled "The N-Word" from Charles' pov, "Hearing that word . . . / brings back the smell/of German shepherd breath/ of fresh gasoline/ and sulfur air.

It would be the easy way out to paint Beckwith's evil in a stereotypical way, focus on the hate speech and the hood, but Walker explores his fear. In "Harriet Tubman as Villian: A Ghost Story" Beckwith's persona imagines a narrative where Tubman succeeded in freeing all slaves, referring to the owners as "the poor old farmer and his wife" who after working their own fields were found "frozen to a cotton bush, fingers and hands cut up / and still bleeding after working themselves to death." Walker demonstrates the way a story that would signify hope for some, twists like a knife in the mind a person obsessed with the fear of seeing everything that represents order disappear, who will hold on to it with a white knuckled grip.

But it is the voice of Myrlie that is the conscience behind the story, opening and closing with the importance of not forgetting, "When people talk /about the movement as if it started in '64 . . . /It means he lived and died for nothing. / And that's worse than killing him again."

There are 49 gems in this collection, as important for the technical skill of Walker's lines as for their ability to make certain emotions, fear, hate, grief, resolve, consolation == palpable. ( )