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Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Sandra Beasley, Guilt Ledger is Ross White’s sophomore poetry collection.
In Guilt Ledger, money is a weight, a wound, and a reckoning. Opening amid the fallout of the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s, this collection maps the complex and corrosive impact of the financial sector on a family. It charts a childhood in the banking centers of the South and the speaker’s acceptance of late-stage capitalism’s unpayable cost: the emotional loss tied to monetary gain. These poems interrogate the tangled legacy between fathers and sons, the hidden debts and moral consequences of the American economic system, and the persistent echoes of a culture that commodifies everything it touches.
The precipitating event of Guilt Ledger is the collapse of the National Bank of Washington, which was taken over by federal regulators in 1989 at the height of the savings and loan scandals of the late 1980s. These poems attempt to trace how the disintegration of the American financial system, which accelerated in the 2008 recession and threatens to do so again under protectionist economic policies, presses against personal and familial relationships—and how the children of that disintegration might reject greed in favor of something more substantial than wealth. Amid continued financial scandal, political corruption, and corporate malfeasance, Guilt Ledger’s examination of the savings & loan crisis (including appearances by the Keating Five and former Speaker of the House Jim Wright) reminds us that money never sleeps and it dreams a destructive dream.
Guilt Ledger tells a story of inheritances and indelible impressions—“Consider each family a mint of sorts,” it declares. Ross White’s collection captures a very particular era of American banking scandal, but it is about so much more. Among the poet's formidable talents are his ability to use unexpected vessels for portraiture, pattern-making, and dark humor. “Today they fired the receptionist,” observes “Downsizing.” “Today they fired the efficiency expert who conducted the first round of firings. / . . . They fired the list of fireable offenses. / . . . Fired the hand that could no longer sign its name.”
Those who have passed through Washington, D.C., will recognize the martini-brine of “temples to transactionality” and feel the particular thrill of the Red Line metro whooshing past. Reading Guilt Ledger opens a door for me—to talking about economic wreckage, mistakes of our fathers, mistakes we keep making—and I find myself deeply grateful for these daring, profoundly moving poems.
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode