Ludlow is a novel in verse, meaning it has the speed, concision and accuracy of the best poetry, along with the expansiveness and character development of a novel. It tells the story of a handful of immigrants—Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian—in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, in which elements of the Colorado National Guard killed striking miners and family members.

The novel follows two primary characters: the fictional Luisa Mole, orphaned in the opening chapter, who must choose between life among the miners and the middle-class family who adopt her; and the historical figure Louis Tikas, a Cretan immigrant who, in the course of the book, becomes a labor organizer and a Ludlow martyr. But several minor characters—Too Tall MacIntosh, Lefty Calabrini, George Reed and his family, and even John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—also play significant roles in the book, which never succumbs to simplistic political pieties, but is engaged with identity and being.

I have also deliberately planted a version of the author in the book, guiding the story in time, allowing us to look at events from the vantage point of the whole century, and to understand both the personal import of the story to me and the profound difficulty of ever knowing the truth about such events. In a sense, the characters are more “grounded” and real than the author, who tells the story as a way of holding onto his own identity in the West. It’s as if the historical fictions of Tolstoy or Cormac McCarthy met the radical skepticism of Jorge Luis Borges with a cinematic vividness. Indeed, my prose Afterword quotes Borges’ call for a renewal of storytelling in verse. The book ends long after the massacre, with America changed by more wars and upheaval, in a scene where the author comes to know Luisa Mole more fully and imaginatively.

Finally, Ludlow is about language and landscape—the many languages that have named Colorado and America—the geographical memory of the nation.