Charles Reznikoff's Testimony of the Dead

Abstract:Charles Reznikoff assembles Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative from three decades of court witness reports. Stemming from his legal experience and his family history of loss, Reznikoff's methods of constructing Testimony, as archived in his notes, drafts, and correspondence, illuminate the work as his literary form of Kaddish, the mourner's prayer in Judaism. The poetic volumes express mourning for the lives he encounters in court documents: suppressed, recurring narratives, emblematic of the country's political and socioeconomic conditions. As the past resonates through Reznikoff's verse, the poetry's formal qualities stimulate grief in present audiences. Testimony takes readers through a process of mourning across time: listening to the lost voices of the dead, grieving the accumulated losses, and moving forward with a desire to remedy past injustices—bearing losses of the past to feel the urgency of a more just future.