Microreview: Printer’s Fist
Michelle C. Harvey
Melissa Range is a poet from East Tennessee and a professor of creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, with a particular emphasis on women writers and writers of colour. She is the author of three poetry collections: Scriptorium (Beacon Press, 2016), Horse and Rider (2010), and Printer’s Fist, which earned the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize.
Printer’s Fist curates a chorus of abolitionist voices, drawing on archival material from the 18th and 19th centuries (with a special interest in print media) as both inspiration and poetic form. Range started working on Printer’s Fist in 2013 during a fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society and spent thirteen years on the project. Before getting to the content of the poem, this amount of time spent feels like an opening to the possibility of deep work, permitting us to lean into devotion, and offer resistance to the increasingly prevalent culture of immediacy.
Labour and theology both take a dialectical position in this sequence, both as instruments of exploitation and as sites of resistance and liberation. The poem Come-Outers is an example where this is especially apparent. The poem is a golden shovel, a form invented by Terrance Hayes, paying homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The last word of every line amounts to the first stanza of the “Bible Defence of Slavery” by Frances Ellen Watkins. The poem centres on the eucharist and the relentless labour that goes into baking communion bread meanwhile “round after round of Sabbaths, they call us servants.” The poem asks “Who among us cannot taste the lie of this communion?” and ends with a call to resistance in leaving “the wheat in the ground.” The borrowing of both form and content connects us to a lineage of writers connected to the wider movement, and also brings our attention to the Bible’s role in upholding slavery. The baking of communion bread can be withheld, thus denying the possibility of performing the ritual at all, an act bound to both material and theological significance.
Conversations around theology and labour can often feel confined to certain domains, namely the academic and the inner workings of resistance movements. This book encouraged me to reflect on what the poetic form brings to this conversation, which I think is the evocative nature of embodied experience. There is something quite different about reading the history of an event versus living vicariously through it in narrative form. In Aristotle’s book on poetics, he writes that history deals with particulars and events that have happened, and poetry deals with universal truths and what might happen. The historical poem collapses those binaries, and in doing so, we are drawn into a world that we know is partly fiction, but at the same time structurally true, which allows us to access the significance of the material in a different way than we would when reading an academic article. For example, The Train from Macon details the famous escape of Ellen and William Craft in 1848. Ellen played the role of a white male enslaver due to her lighter skin and William posed as her enslaved servant as they travelled by train and steamboat from Macon, Georgia, to freedom in Philadelphia. The poem highlights the high stakes of the mission’s failure, while also playing on the gender reversal of their disguise: “though she knows the law says she’s not a woman, either, but a chattel from some Missis if their plan falls through.” The poem offers only a snapshot of the train journey, yet we are deeply captivated by their bravery, ingenuity, and determination.
Another aspect of this book I really loved was its insistence on including a wide diversity of resistance acts. Upon first reading, this can seem unsettling—Angelina Grimke Ruins Her Clothes recounts the fashion struggles of two sisters who defy their enslaving parents to become Quaker abolitionists. This is juxtaposed with the execution of Denmark Vessy and his allies, a formerly enslaved carpenter who conspired a plot to set fire to Charleston. Later, we hear about Elizabeth Margaret Chandler’s promise to give up dessert in solidarity with a boycott of “slave sugar from the South.” Alas, Range’s intent is not to overlook the wildly different stakes at play, but rather to honour the plurality of abolitionist voices determined to honour the goal of her epigraph—to “see the edifice tremble” and continue relentlessly until its fall.
In a world where CEOs earn three hundred times more than the average worker (compared to twenty times more in the 1950s), one percent of people own thirty-two percent of the wealth of America, and ICE has deported tens of thousands of so-called unauthorised workers— the question of labour is ever more urgent. Printer’s Fist bears witness to all types of labor, both high- and low-stakes, which raises the question: What am I doing? Could I do more? The sequence ends with a call to action: “Wanted: heralds, fanatics, to stoke fires, whose empty hands can make a printer’s fist” and reminds us that “your story ends with freedom, or it doesn’t end.”
Come-Outers
To take
his body is to take sackcloth
on the tongue. Which of
us has not baked the
bread, squinted into the darkest
oven corner at raw dough, unstoked coals? They tell us to die
for God, for children, and
for our husbands, to shroud
our hands in flour, our mouths in the
gospel the pulpits
say we aren’t allowed to speak. Round
after round of Sabbaths, they call us servants,
tell us what Moloch to serve—up before the rising of
the sun, wrapping loaves in paper (warm body, cold before we get him
to the altar, body we are commanded to tear). Who
among us cannot
taste the lie
of this communion? We will not sit
in our pews one more Sunday morning;
we will no longer walk on the backs of our sisters; we will leave the
wheat in the ground.
(from Printer’s Fist © Melissa Range 2026. Used with permission from Vanderbilt University Press.)
Michelle Harvey just completed her Master’s of Theological Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. She also holds a BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Her academic focus is on new spirituality movements and the role that the academic study of religion has in shaping the practice, ethics and philosophy of these groups. As the “spiritual but not religious” category grows, she believes there’s a heightened responsibility to examine and contribute to the discourse on how these groups interact with the economy and the communities they inhabit.