Amandla Publishing - Quarry Books 
 
 

 

Quarry Books

 

Quarry Books is a series of chapbooks intended to reclaim Vermonters who time has buried less than overlooked. The past may not make itself known to us until we have caught up with it, despite the efforts of the archaeologists and historians. It may take a word, a shout in the street, rustlings of one kind or another - the collisions of deja vu - to bring it back. The already-heard, as it were, that reaches us like an echo.

 

So Then 
Genevieve Taggard and 
The West Rutland Marble Workers

Robert Buckeye  

Quarry Books No. 10

Fall  2011  

$10

"There are ashes before which
  Granite turns to dust"              
               -- Marina Tsvetayeva

The night Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, Herbst was in an Italian restaurant in Portland, Maine, listening to the radio for the news, which everyone knew would not be good. At midnight the announcer said the prison would go dark, the lights would go out, if the two men were executed in the electric chair. A few minutes later, the Italian who ran the restaurant began to close up but hesitated for a moment to turn off the light switch. "Electricity," he said to Herbst, "It that what it's for? Is that the thing to do?" In the Thirties the writer asked himself the same question, somewhat differently. Writing? What is it for?