<< In the raw data of a census, you can see who lived next door to whom,
their households with grandchildren, lodgers, slaves; how they are
marked as illiterate, what language their parents spoke, how they lived
in close density to one another in a Northeastern city, or were among
the very few people in a town, named for an animal, on a prairie. The
Statistical Abstract of the United States is an historical compilation
of census data. In its tables you can see the large trends in our
society over time--how people marry or don't, what they die from, how
they go to school. We are all something like and unlike the societal
changes that we see in statistics. Here is our history.>>
Stephanie Brown, whose poems have appeared in BAP and on this site, and who recently offered an astrological reading of Grace Kelly's career, comments on her poems (such as "The Census: 2010") in the new Ploughshares. Take a look!
