The poems of What Travels with Us are intense, intimate, memorable. Darnell Arnoult opens a window on a world and land and lives now mostly gone, and lets the forgotten, the inarticulate, and the dead, speak for themselves, which means they also speak for us, as well as to us.

In What Travels With Us, Darnell Arnoult shows her impressive ability to render both the communal and the personal, creating a densely layered collection of poems whose language rises and falls with the cadence of real voices from a community slowly losing its sense of itself, its stories, its place.  

At the center of this 'place' is the poet's eye, a sharp and discerning, yet loving, eye that is able to render these people's lives with humor and generosity.  She gives to her free verse a narrative swing and to forms like pantoum and sestina a down-home unpretentiousness. Sassy and folksy at times, yet dead-on serious, her work shows the timing of a story-teller and the emotional range of a singer.