JOSHUA POTEAT

From Replica of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue, Fall 1900

 Drug Department
 Lighting Department
 Memorial Department

The poems here are from Poteat’s third manuscript, a series of pieces with appropriated titles all taken from departments in an antiquated Sears catalogue. The titles serve simultaneously as shield and vehicle, grounding each piece in Sears’s various and sundry goods while moving towards larger subjects: turn-of-the-19th-century America; Richmond, Virginia past and present (more specifically, the city’s historic neighborhood of Church Hill); gentrification; architecture/ruins; and touching briefly on what will be the heart of the manuscript—Poteat’s southern familial history of slave ownership. 

   Contributor’s notes