Walking Back Up Depot Street is an epic journey, in the original sense of epic as a story that poets invented to remind people of their own history. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, told through the eyes of a white woman named Beatrice, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers -- and of sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma.