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Author’s Synopsis

I have always loved history, my favorite subject in school, my favorite subject now. I love searching through old books, old documents, microfiche (the shhh-khhh of the glass tray sliding against metal!), anything that makes me feel like a desk-bound Indiana Jones. Old photographs, old films, postcards, letters, all the little bits and pieces that remain after the people are gone, I can’t get enough of it. The titular poem in what it feels like to be run over(mm/dd/yyyy) is based on a 1900 silent film showing a car careening towards the camera, allowing people who did not own a car, who maybe had never even seen one in person, to imagine what it would, well, feel like to be run over. And I know that feeling, most of us do. The fact that I could actually look up when the film was first shown, who the actors were, what theaters played it, even though it was made almost 100 years before I was born, made it that much more real and immediate to me. Writing poems based on specific historical moments meant I had the exact date, the month, the year, in which it occurred, and I thought: wait a second, is this a theme? If you’ve ever taken a writing course, you know the theme is everything, so any poem that could fit the subtitle (mm/dd/yyyy) became a contender for the collection.

With these 40 poems, spanning the years 712 CE to January 2026, I’ve tried to find the people (and sometimes animals!) who created these moments, and the shared experiences we all have that help us relate to them no matter the year (or century). Whether it’s boys waving at a film camera during the Battle of the Somme(1918), Virginia and Leonard Woolfe listening to the beginnings of WWII on the radio (1937), or the extinction of the Great Aulk (1844), there is always an element of each story we can find in our own lives.

Sample Poems

(0) 1900

a director made a short film titled (what it feels like to be run over)
a horse and buggy canter past the camera
you, the viewer, wait for it to veer
and it does, away from you
suddenly, a car with a man and a woman
in too many clothes barrels straight into the camera
and, consequently, into you
if you have never actually been run over
you can’t feel the destruction to your body
a be-hatted man and woman and their car running over you would cause
you can only guess, but that is not the point
the horse and buggy were supposed to get you
something you could clock and wait on
not a thing in your periphery, just invented,
and you’re flattened, out of nowhere
and that is it, that is precisely
what it feels like to be run over
knowing some day you will die
and the surprise that it is today

(1) 712

the japanese character for “the appearance of a dragon in flight” requires 84 strokes
there once was a man, because women were not allowed to write,
who looked up, and looked down, and, with his hand, recorded what he saw
everyone believed him.
there once was a woman, because men decided she was allowed to write,
who looked up, and looked down, and, with her hand, recorded what she saw
there’s no such thing as dragons, the men said.

Publisher Note

Jon-David Hague, publisher at Westbrae Literary Group, calls the book “poetry as an unsparing and essential act of witness.” Hague adds, “We published this collection because LaDew doesn’t just record history; she makes you feel its weight, its strange echoes, and its relentless present tense. Her singular voice brings urgency and meticulous detail to the untold narratives that shape our world.”

About the Author

Kate LaDew is a poet, fiction writer, and visual artist with a BA in Studio Arts. Her work explores women’s histories, civil rights, and underrepresented historical figures. LaDew lives in Graham, North Carolina, with her cats, James Cagney and Janis Joplin. Her personal reading and research spans archival fiction, history, documenting old cemeteries, sketching and origami. Her poetry and prose has appeared in journals such as EVENT, The Maynard, Sonic Boom, and Under a Warm Green Linden.

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