"Quenton Baker's ballast is a beautiful, hard and necessary book. Raging, electric, precise and elegiac. It is a lamentation in three parts. A brilliant refusal; a black perseverance."
–Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes "Ballast is erasure executed at the most exacting level. Erasure as excavation. Erasure as return. As in: return to the people what they are owed. Even when what they are owed is irrecoverable, though in these luminous [re]nderings, Baker gets us closer to beginning to understand how much has been lost, and returns us to ourselves, as the best poets tend to do. Not since Zong! has there been such an insistent polyvocal reckoning with the histories of the enslaved through the study of colonial documents. This collection is an example of the care and scholarship we should all be striving for."
–Marwa Helal, author of Ante Body