Unhired Hands
Van Cortlandt Park Alliance and Van Cortlandt House Museum presents a poetry reading by poet and Bronx byproduct David Mills.
Mills will read from Unhired Hands, his new poetry collection about slavery in Queens and Massachusetts. The reading will be held inside the Van Cortlandt House Museum (reading location is only accessible via stairs).
Space is limited so advance registration is required.
This reading is a part of Van Cortlandt Park Alliance’s Reimagining initiative. In partnership with the Design Trust for Public Space and Immanuel Oni, Liminal Sp, VCPA invites the community to reimagine the park’s Enslaved African Burial Ground site as a memorial space that fosters long-term healing and restoration. This project is supported by the Mellon Foundation.
This event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
About Unhired Hands: You never quite know where to place Mills’ work in the poetic landscape. This is a good thing given the clusters of poets bunched around the same subjects and approaches. In Unhired Hands, where he explores slavery in Queens and Massachusetts, he’s formal while wild in style; he’s both historical/recognizable and strange/innovative. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson tuning in from the outer boroughs; like Phillis Wheatley riding Funkadelic’s mothership. He possesses an archival acumen akin to Natasha Trethewey; a cultural vernacular rich as that of August Wilson; the intellectual quirks of Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra. Unhired Hands highlights his expressive documentarian impulses while adding to his clear technical mastery. He reconstructs / conjures Queens (through the lives of enslaved individuals Victoria Earle Matthews, Millie Tunnell, and Martha Peterson), and Massachusetts (with an homage to Phillis Wheatley). His research is exacting, but open; the poems are formal but never formulaic. The image of Matthews sneaking books between chores, her eyes “learning to swim, learning to sink into literature’s at turns clear and sometimes troubling waters” is a kind of statement of poetics and a lyrical reconstruction of history. Mills writes beyond “the jurisdiction of flinch,” into the intimacy of interrogation: its also an “interrogation of intimacy.” This collection is akin to a history book scored by form and spirit, ingenuity and telepathic empathy…
Terrance Hayes, National Book Award and MacArthur-Genius-Award winning author of Lighthead.
About David Mills: David Mills is currently a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow finishing a poetry collection about slavery in the Bronx. He holds an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and an M.A. from New York University in creative writing. He’s published five collections: Unhired Hands, Boneyarn (Manhattan slavery poems), After Mistic, The Sudden Country and The Dream Detective. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Fence, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Brooklyn Rail, and Obsidian. He has received a 2026 NYSCA grant to write a poetry collection about Brooklyn slavery.
