the GENDER issue / POETRY
The Loophole of Retreat*
by Sequoia Maner
A found poem from Harriet Ann Jacobs’s 1863 narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl which recounts how Jacobs escaped her lecherous and cruel master, James Norcom, ultimately securing freedom for herself and her children by hiding in the garret space of her grandmother’s house for seven years before fleeing North.
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This poem is best viewed on non-mobile device.
Sequoia Maner is a Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She earned her B.A. in English from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2019). Her essays and poetry can be found in Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.