The Plot: Patricia Hruby Powell's Loving Vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case (2017) with artwork by Shadra Strickland is an interesting approach to the verse narrative form. Powell's work tells the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, who fell in love as teenagers in Caroline County. The Loving's story underscores the ways in which the cruelties and injustices of segregation and racism impacted one couple. The narrative begins in the fall of 1952 and follows the couple through the US Supreme Court's final ruling on their case in 1967. The narrative describes Mildred and Richard's experience growing up together in their small community, their love story, their marriage and the birth of their three children, and their almost decade-long court battle to allow them to live together as husband and wife in their hometown.The Poetry: Powell's Loving Vs. Virginia is a polyvocal narrative that alternates between poems from Mildred and Richard's point of view, with each poem titled with one character's name and often with a date and place. The poems are told in free verse and make use of short lines and the space on the page to encourage reader contemplation. Interspersed throughout the poems are various documents and photographs (as indicated by the subtitle of the narrative) illustrating the historical context of the Loving's story. While the poems in this collection don't stand out particularly in their lyricism or use of language, together with the documentary elements of the work, the most successful poems in the collection seem to be those that focus on the characters' emotions. For example, in one poem in the middle of the work, the speaker of the poem Richard relates his experience of seeing Mildred "holding a bunch of greens / like they was a bouquet of wedding flowers" and the way that her smile makes "any doubts I might've had-- ... / drifted away on the wind" (142). The poem ends with the lines: "My country gal / I am her husband" (142). This short 12-line poem is juxtaposed with an illustration of Mildred smiling in the family's garden.
The Page: One of the most striking elements of Powell's Loving Vs. Virginia is the way in which various formal elements are woven together to tell the Loving's story: Strickland's artwork, the blue-toned photographs, the quotes from court cases and public figures, and the poems co-mingle together to make this a unique work. The narrative includes several timelines, an epigraph from Langston Hughes, a bibliography of sources, and notes from the artist and author.
I enjoyed the hybrid, collage-style form of Powell's verse narrative. I give it four stars.
