Woodard, Deborah: No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911

Illustrations by John Burgess (Ravenna Press, paperback)

Publication Date: November 9, 2018

Publisher Marketing: 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.  Well-accompanied by illustrations by John Burgess that enact their own examination.

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. These mordant, stubbornly human prose poems are collaged from the transcripts of the trial of the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. 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. 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. In No Finis, immigrant survivors continue to be heard even as they continue to be questioned and squelched to this very day. 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.