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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
TEMPORAL HEALINGS a review by Sheila Smith McKoy Glenis Redmond. The Listening Skin. Four Way Books, 2022. Crystal Simone Smith. Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound. Duke University Press, 2025.
The poems in Crystal Simone Smith’s Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound and Glenis Redmond’s The Listening Skin are deeply connected to the American South, its striking beauty and the ever-presence of America’s racial woes. Storytellers who center Black voices, Smith and Redmond focus on the possibilities of cross-generational healing and on giving voice to the lurking American traumas that make that healing necessary. Crystal Simone Smith’s Runagate takes readers on a journey through America’s divisive past, delving into the experiences of the enslaved, their enslavers, and the ongoing pursuit of
Winter 2026
freedom, even though it is often illusive. Runagate responds to the political conversations that minimize the horrors of enslavement in favor of teaching that enslaved people – the branded, the sold and resold, the denigrated – benefited from the institution of enslavement. Runagate showcases Smith’s dual mastery of Black American freedom narratives and what she calls “Zen-inspired” Japanese poetic forms of haiku, tanka, and haibun (xix). Based on wanted notices for runaways that are catalogued in Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery, these poems respond to the postings written
SHEILA SMITH MCKOY is an awardwinning poet, fiction writer, filmmaker, and scholar. She earned a PhD in English from Duke University, an MA in English from UNC Chapel Hill, and a BA in English from NC State University. She is the recipient of the 2020 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Prize in Poetry; served as an editor of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora; and has written, produced, and directed several documentary films. She is the author of The Bones Beneath (Black Lawrence Press, 2024; reviewed in this issue), and her poetry is included in One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku (Unicorn Press, 2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019), a collaboration of five Black poets in celebration of the haiku tradition.
ABOVE Crystal Simone Smith (right) receiving
the 2025 Roanoke-Chowan Award for her collection Runagate from Sejal Mehta, a North Carolina Literary and Historical Association board member and one of the 2025 judges, Raleigh, NC, 5 Dec. 2025
As founder and editor of Backbone Press, CRYSTAL SIMONE SMITH published new and emerging poets for over a decade. She currently serves as the president of the Haiku Society of America. Runagate, her third full-length volume of poetry, received the 2025 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks.