Genocide is an often hidden part of our nation’s history, so as a poet, I wonder how poetry might play a role in raising awareness. We can look to Denise Low’s latest full-length poetry collection, House of Grace, House of Blood for an answer. The historical event Low uncovers in this collection is the Gnadenhutten Massacre, during which in 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacifist Christian Delawares (the Lenape) in Ohio. Accounts of genocide are often framed in statistics, in numbers killed, but little else. To seek out the individual stories behind the statistics represents the hard work of the documentarian. Low has done this in assembling this collection which can be hard to read, but which is, at the same time, necessary reading.
Like many atrocities, the Gnadenhutten Massacre was silenced and forgotten. Low has not only unearthed, but given depth to this sordid part of our nation’s history, by interweaving stories from both sides. Low is uniquely positioned to do so, being of both indigenous American and colonial European heritage. As she discusses in the preface to her book, through her maternal grandfather, her family has ties to the Lenape refugees. Through her maternal grandmother, her family has ties to migrants of European descent who settled not far from the location of the massacre. Low, a former Kansas Poet Laureate, provides insight into this depth of interrelationship in poems with the titles “Walking with My Delaware Grandfather,” “Trails of My Relatives: Ohio to Kansas,” and “Descendancy.”
This book belongs to the subgenre of documentary poetry. Mark Nowak, in an essay first published in 2010 on the website of the Poetry Foundation, offers that documentary poetry “has no founder, no contested inception, no signature spokespersons claiming its cultural capital.” He cites as examples of documentary poems Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” and Langston Hughes’ “Johannesburg Mines.”
If we think of documentary film, in which a historical event or personage is covered in some depth, then documentary poetry follows a similar strategy: poetry as an artistic medium offers degrees of freedom to fill in the gaps in the historical record. In House of Grace, House of Blood, Low interweaves narratives of indigenous people and colonial soldiers, while also embracing the unknown and offering her interpretation of this horrid event from the perspective of one descended from both heritages. Lowapplies these strategies with skill, resulting in a gripping collection. The book is divided into ten sections, starting with “Slaughter of the Innocents, Ohio, March 7-8, 1782,” and ending with “Ohio: Memorials.” In between, the various sections deal with themes of silence, acts of witness, Christianity, geography, diaspora, rivers, and fire.
Many of the individual poems in the collection interweave “found” text with the poet’s own words. The found text utilized here is painstakingly researched text; by all accounts this book represents a project of significant proportions. The scope of the work is understandable given the magnitude of the injustice. Low finds and pulls at threads of the narrative, from the names and stories of the militia members, to the survivors who nearly became victims who all but faded from public view, to the poet’s own heritage. Throughout, Low’s voice is one of authority, which is well-earned given the depth of her research. Interspersed among the historical accounts are poems entirely in the poet’s voice as she attempts to reach an understanding of what occurred at Gnadenhutten, and why.
The very first poem, from which the book takes its title, “House of Grace, House of Blood” (p. 5), serves as an ars poetica of sorts for the collection. In the poem Low writes:
Ears are portals for hearing pleas
and scriptures— words of possibilities.
Eyes are sentries judging friend or nor
and who may be safe in this house.
Here the poet’s ears are open to the words of Christians, of indigenous people, of soldiers. The poem describes the act of seeing, vision being the principle means of the act of witness. It ends in acknowledgement of the duality of life and death, milk and blood, with these words:
This heart powers blood through flesh
also anger— the fierce kindling of murder.
Scent of mother’s milk is the first miracle—
the body’s red streams turned white and sweet.
This poem serves as an example of Low’s ability to provide context, to connect the tragedy of Gnadenhutten, a historical event over two hundred year’s distant, with today, through commonalities: of life; of death; of grief.
Poems in this collection which describe the massacre itself, understandably, make for uncomfortable reading. But they are necessary to the power of the collection . Silencing is directly addressed in the poem “The Perpetrators Vow Not to Talk” (p. 17). The poem consists of four stanzas, one of which reads:
They worry they might be called to account for the massacre by military authorities at
Fort Pitt. They vow not to talk.
Solomon was the man who, years later, pantomimed scalping victims in the raid
whenever he was drunk.
Despite their pact to remain silent about their murderous act, it seems at least this perpetrator could not wholly refrain from speaking about the incident. And yet, through the grief, threads of hope for a peaceful coexistence appear, as in the poem “Their Names / Benjamin Holmes” (p. 10). This poem identifies one of the soldiers “who refused to kill,” named Obadiah Holmes. The poem reveals that this soldier adopted a Lenape boy who ran to him as the massacre was taking place. Obadiah named his adopted son Benjamin. The poem concludes:
Benjamin Holmes
lived with Obadiah
until grown.
He disappeared afterward
from settler history.
He enters these pages
as a grown Lenape man:
Benjamin Holmes.
In the same poem, Obadiah names Nathan Rollins as a soldier who participated in the act of killing. The poem quotes Rollins as saying of his participation in the massacre “it was no satisfaction / for the loss of his father & uncle / after all.” There had been casualties on both sides of ongoing conflicts between indigenous tribes and colonial settlers, and Rollins’ words seem to acknowledge the loss of his father and uncle to the conflict did not justify the act of genocide perpetrated by soldiers upon the innocent.
The poem “Acknowledgment of Lenape Lands” (p. 65) outlines the history of this indigenous tribe’s fight for survival. The poet, as if knowing no formal acknowledgment will be forthcoming from the government itself, writes the acknowledgment from a tribal member’s perspective. The poem begins:
In Dawnland through five centuries
Lenapes fight:
Spanish, Swedes, Dutch,
English, and United States settlers.
Blood-stained roads lead
Away from New Jersey—
escape routes shared by Lenapes
and runaway Africans.
The poem goes on to name some of the places the Lenape settled after their expulsion from the homeland they knew as Dawnland, renamed New Jersey by the colonial government. The poem ends as follows:
Lenape people are alive,
hearts beating streams of red blood.
All the lands and waters where we continue,
I acknowledge.
Despite the efforts of some to effect the disappearance of the Lenape people, the poet acknowledges on behalf of the Lenape that these efforts have failed. The Lenape people walk among us.
In presenting all sides of the story, Low argues for an open rather than closed history, an approach that allows us to understand the multiplicity of grief caused by the expansion of the territories of the United States. Low says as much in her preface: “I acknowledge the conflicted history of my homeland and my family, with the intention that clarity can lead to healing.” This approach is evident in the poem “A Delaware Catechism” (p. 28) which includes the lines:
“The Delawares believe
the spirit leaves the earth to journey
to the stars.”
They believe in life beyond miseries
beyond twelve layers of heavens
beyond the grief of Gnadenhutten.
By contrasting indigenous and Christian spiritual beliefs in this poem, Low provides context for one degree of the “otherness” faced by the Lenape when faced themselves by a religion new to them called Christianity. The irony that the Lenape were murdered despite adopting the religion of the colonists is not lost upon the reader.
The book concludes with the poem “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County, Kansas” (p. 101), which describes an indigenous cultural event at which Low herself is present. Her presence and welcoming tone invite the reader into the circle. Nowhere in the collection is the seeking of healing more clear. The poem includes the lines:
I wait for the tail-end of the man-woman procession. Lead women are shell-shakers.
Double-time steps rustle turtle-shell rattles tied to shins.
(...)
My grandfather and grandmother lived on Lenape land near this spot. Their footprints
remain in this ground.
(...)
We dance.
Here, in addition to the themes explored by Low, we see her technical skill as a poet. There is a strong consonance and rhythm. including in the hyphenated phrases “tail-end,” “shell-shakers,” “double-time,” and “turtle-shell.” Ultimately sound and meaning converge at a point where the reader can almost hear the footsteps of the grandparents. In the ending phrase “we dance,” the reader can easily envision the broadest possible “we,” with the generations dancing together.
Poets may still sing about themselves and about the body electric, but we’re also thankful for the poet who also, seeking justice, shines the spotlight on the oppressed. Documentary poetry may seek to keep alive the memory of those who have been lost, and to keep outrages from being silenced or forgotten. And if it feels that we have become desensitized by body counts, or have assumed a blasé indifference to those killed who are unnamed or unknow to us, maybe it takes a poet to bring death to life in the eyes of the reader in such a book as House of Grace, House of Blood. It’s difficult to write a brief review of such a comprehensive book whose insights are as breathtaking as the vistas that can still be found in this homeland. It is a homeland shared by many in a place now known as the United States of America. It’s up to us as readers to walk through the doors opened for us and as out hidden history continues to be revealed.
Dave Seter is a poet, nature writer, and essayist, and author of the poetry collection Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021), and the chapbooks Somewhere West of the Mississippi (Mammoth Publications, 2025) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010). His poetry won the KNOCK Ecolit Prize and his poetry book reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Poetry Flash, and elsewhere. Seter has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. He is the Sonoma County Poet Laureate, 2024-2026. More at daveseter.com