Abstract
It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the swords raised and lives lost by the thousands of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War--of whom hundreds were Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their African Brethren. Commemorating the dismal treatment they experienced at the hands of Confederates and White Union soldiers alike, and brilliantly capturing the language and rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser's The Day-Breakers is a powerful and original new perspective on Black experience.