Interspersed throughout the collection are illustrations representing the claustrophobic work environment of the factory. The collection focuses on the defense attorney Max Steuer’s dizzying cross-examination of the witnesses, which include survivors, firemen, and merchants to the factory. As the collection illustrates, the trial illuminated the cramped working conditions and poor escape routes notoriously, one of the two exits was locked and opened inwards instead of outwards, preventing the crush of workers-mostly women-trying to escape from pushing the door down. Historically, the owners of the factory, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, were ultimately acquitted of the deaths of the 146 garment workers, but the trial laid the groundwork for examining the conditions of similar factories in the United States. Woodard imaginatively excises lines from the trial transcript and arranges them into poems, adding, as she writes in the forward, “a few fictional threads,” while maintaining the integrity of the original words. ![]() Her poems reify the experiences of the victims and, in doing so, shed a timely light on issues of labor injustice, women’s rights, and immigration. org/book-review/a-review-of- no-finis-triangle-testimonies- 1911-by-deborah-woodard/ĭeborah Woodard’s newest chapbook, No Finis, is a striking reimagining of the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire trial. I said, “Please, girls, my feet!” There wasn’t room for a pin. The smoke came from the floor below, and I was rubbing against the walls. Suddenly he started away, and I just got in. I didn’t know what it was, whether staircase or elevator. Testimony, John Burgess’s drawings of the social spaces the workers inhabited, from work lofts to graves, complements and completes this act of bearing witness. In No Finis, immigrant survivors continue to be heard even as they continue to be questioned and squelched to this very day. And her book erupts with the wayward realities of human feeling struck out or made invisible by the unfolding narrative of the apparatus of the court. Woodard has an unerring poet’s ear for the alive language of the witnesses, a vividly pungent, insistent language edited and censored by the courts yet straining to be heard. ![]() These mordant, stubbornly human prose poems are collaged from the transcripts of the trial of the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. In No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911, Deborah Woodard creates a book for our moment by excavating and illuminating a famous yet half-forgotten moment of past judicial and economic injustice against immigrants. Well-accompanied by illustrations by John Burgess that enact their own examination. An elegant selection and poetic rendering of often harrowing trial testimony from survivors of the Triangle Fire in 1911, New York city, where workers died in the infamous fire at the shirtwaist factory.
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