Poet Lisa Russ Spaar collects fifty contemporary poems - most original to this anthology - that engage the complex legacy of Thomas Jefferson and his plantation home at Monticello. Many of these poems wrestle with the history of race and freedom at the heart of both Jefferson's story and America's own. Others consider Jefferson as a figure of Enlightenment rationalism.

Lisa Russ Spaar, Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose and the editor of All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (Virginia).