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The Hardman County Sequence: Poems
Michael Jennings
A quiet, potent collaboration across time: poems by Michael Jennings set against the Depression-era photographs Dorothea Lange made in Hardeman County, Texas—the tenant farmers, worn faces, and emptied land of the 1930s. Issued in 1980 in a small edition, the sequence lets Jennings's spare verse answer Lange's images, giving voice to the people caught in her frames without pretending to speak for them. It belongs to a rich tradition of pairing documentary photography with text, and it works because Jennings resists sentimentality, letting the plainness of the lives do the emotional work. For readers drawn to Lange's iconic imagery, or to poetry that reckons with American hardship and place, it's a moving and unusual small book—the kind of thing that rewards being read slowly, image beside line.
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The author
Michael Jennings, born in New Orleans and raised partly in Iran, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and was a creative-writing fellow at Syracuse. He is a poet drawn to landscape, memory, and the American grain, and here he writes in direct response to a body of documentary photographs.
The book
The Hardman County Sequence pairs Jennings's poems with Dorothea Lange's photographs from Hardeman County, Texas, made during her Depression-era documentary work. Published in 1980 in a small print run, it is a deliberate collaboration between word and image about a specific place and a specific hard season.
How it reads
The strength of the sequence is restraint: Jennings lets Lange's faces set the register and keeps his language plain, so the poems illuminate rather than caption. Read with the photographs, the two media sharpen each other.
For more context
Lange's Texas photographs sit alongside her Migrant Mother as central documents of the 1930s; her archive is held by the Oakland Museum of California, which stewards much of her Depression-era work.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Michael Jennings
- Year
- 1980
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine
Poems set against Dorothea Lange photographs.