UNHIRED HANDS, poetry by David Mills

Publication Date: November 30, 2025

Paperback, 82 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-26-0

This nation is built of the labor of unhired hands – the hands of enslaved peoples – and David Mills yokes history and poetry to tell the stories of some of those hands. Through his compelling narrative and persona poems we are introduced to “Victoria Earle Matthews, Martha Peterson and Millie Tunnell, three African-American women who had been enslaved and who are buried in cemeteries in Queens, New York,” and in a fourth section he writes of “Massachusetts slavery… because, in 1641, Massachusetts was the first North American colony to legally enslave Africans.” By focusing on the history of slavery far from antebellum cotton fields, Mills instructs us on the pervasive endemic legacy of this institution. Writing of an 18th century Massachusetts colonist who beat his slave to death and went largely unpunished he asks, “How do the chasms in Christendom / answer for this offense?” It is a question yet awaiting an answer.

Praise for David Mills & Unhired Hands

Discover the buried stories that history tried to forget. In Unhired Hands, acclaimed poet David Mills resurrects the voices of African-Americans whose lives shaped our nation from Millie Tunnell, born enslaved and laid to rest at Maple Grove Cemetery at 111, to trailblazing journalist and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews, to Martha Peterson, the Iron Lady, whose family members rests at Maple Grove. These poems travel from the plantations of the South to historic cemeteries of Queens, unearthing slavery’s erasures with lyrical power. A vital collection that transforms silence into song, remembrance into resistance.

—Carl Ballenas, Maple Grove Cemetery Historian

David Mills is a poet of the raw and the cooked, the raw being the mass of historical details he digests both intellectually and emotionally to “cook” his poetry. As guide and interlocutor, he explores two geographical points – Queens, NY and Massachusetts – through experiential accounts of enslavement “beyond the jurisdiction of flinch.” Among many other heroes and villains, Mills delineated the lives of Millie Tunnell, who served George Washington in a Virginia tavern as a young woman and, in a wild change of scene, died in Queens at the age of 114; and Onesimus, an African enslaved by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, who introduced inoculations to the New World. Righting glaring omissions to a mostly Whites-Only historical record, Unhired Hands, with lyricism and imagination, delves into “location… if if was / lost once but now if’s…is found.”

—Celia Bland, author of SoftBox

You never quite know where to place Mills’ work in the poetic landscape, which is a good thing given the clusters of poets bunched around the same subjects and approaches. He’s formal while wild in style; he’s both historical/recognizable and strange and innovative. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson tuning in from the outer boroughs. Like Phillis Wheatley riding Funkadelic’s mothership. Mills possesses an archival acumen akin to Natasha Trethewey; a cultural vernacular rich as that of August Wilson; the intellectual quirks of Pharaoh Sanders. Unhired Hands highlights his expressive documentarian impulses while adding to his clear technical mastery. Mills reconstructs / conjures Massachusetts, Queens, the lives of the formerly enslaved Victoria Earle Matthews, Millie Tunnell, and Martha Peterson. Mills’ research is exacting, but open; the poems are formal but never formulaic. The image of Matthews sneaking books between chores, her eyes “learning to swim, learning to sink into literature’s at turns clear and sometimes troubling waters” is a kind of statement of poetics and a lyrical reconstruction of history. He writes beyond “the jurisdiction of flinch,” into the intimacy of interrogation and also an “interrogation of intimacy.” This collection is akin to a history book scored by form and spirit, ingenuity and telepathic empathy...

—Terrance Hayes, Macarthur Genius & National Book Award-winning author of How to be Drawn

David Mills delves into New York and Massachusetts history to emancipate the memories of three intrepid Black women and an entire colony in these intensely researched documentary poems. Carved from fact and bristling imagination, we’ve found a part of ourselves that needed a deeply dedicated poet to resurrect them in verse. Their stories beckon abundantly in the verse Mills scribes in Unhired Hands.

—Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of olio

About the Author

David Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University—both in creative writing—as well as a B.A. (cum laude) from Yale University. He’s published four previous poetry collections: Boneyarn, The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and After Mistic. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Obsidian, Brooklyn Rail, Diode Journal, and Fence. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, The Cullman Center, the New York State Council on the Arts, The Queens Council on the Arts, Flushing Town Hall, The Bronx Council on the Arts, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, Arts Link and a Henry James and Hughes/Diop fellowship. He served as the Bronx County Historical Society Poet-in-Residence and Boneyarn won the North American Book Award.He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark home for three years. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He wrote the audio script for MacArthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black: 100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty West Museums. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.