"No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911"

Seattle-based poet Deborah Woodard, an invited presenter for a recent poetry reading at Chico's 1078 Gallery, gives voice to small voices in "No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911" ($12.95 in paperback from Ravenna Press, ravennapress.com).

Woodard was drawn to an exhibition at New York University on the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, on March 25, 1911, in the Asch Building in New York City. The fire, she writes, "resulted in the deaths of 146 garment workers--mostly young women and mostly recent Eastern European and Italian immigrants."

The factory "occupied the top three floors of the building. Workers on the eighth floor (where smoke was first detected) and the tenth floor (with access to the roof) survived in almost every case. However, the ninth floor became a death trap." The small elevators stopped working and fire spread to escape routes. "Forced to choose between those engulfing flames and plunging to their deaths, scores of young workers leaped from the ninth-floor window ledges."

Fire fighters on the scene, their life nets broken, yelled to the workers not to jump. But they did, sometimes in groups of two or three.

"The Triangle Shirtwaist owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried for the death of a single employee, Margaret Schwartz. The owners were acquitted, thanks in large part to defense attorney Max Steuer's canny and often brutal cross-examination of the witnesses, many of whom ... were forced to testify in English, and had to do their best not to get tripped up."

Woodard's poems are based in part on the trial transcript. The book also contains drawings by John Burgess illustrating the "claustrophobic workspace" and the burial sites, "strewn dots," of the victims.

Mr. Steuer asks Mary Domsky, "It is normal to look up once and awhile at the other girls when they pass, isn't it?/ It is if you don't get caught." Kate Alterman says to Steuer, "There was a wall of smoke. Probably I can make my escape, I thought. The Greene Street door was a curtain of flame, but I was as cool and collected as you are./ I am not half as cool as you think, Miss Alterman."