Afterward, a young archivist approached him. “Why did you spend five years on a poet no one remembered?”
One Tuesday, a water-damaged box arrived from a condemned estate. Inside: a 19th-century journal bound in cracked leather. The owner had been a minor poet named Sabine Durand, erased from history because her patron had been a political dissident. As Will carefully separated the pulp-molded pages, he found something strange—a pressed fern, and beneath it, a single line of verse:
Months passed. He catalogued, de-acidified, resewed bindings. He learned obsolete dialect words. He wrote to rare-book dealers, begged for microfilm access, argued with a dean who said Sabine wasn’t “marketable.” His name, Will Power, became a quiet joke among grant committees—but also a promise. He wouldn’t stop. Will Power Edward Aubanel
Will Power Edward Aubanel had always hated his name. It was a cruel joke his late father, a classics professor with a flair for the absurd, had left him. “Will Power” as a first name, “Edward” as a fig leaf of normalcy, and “Aubanel” as the surname that guaranteed no one would forget the punchline.
He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker. Afterward, a young archivist approached him
By thirty-five, Will had become a man of quiet, stubborn decency—not because of his name, but in spite of it. He worked as a restoration archivist at a failing municipal library, repairing books no one else wanted to read. His coworkers called him Ed.
Two years later, Sabine Durand’s garden poem was read at a UN climate rally. A high school in Vermont named a library after her. And Will Power Edward Aubanel, standing in the back of a crowded auditorium, watched a ghost take a bow. The owner had been a minor poet named
He had power. And he knew exactly what to do with it.
By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore the entire journal. Not as a job. As an act of will.
That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath.