In 1914, the Colorado National Guard confronted striking miners and their families who had gathered in a tent colony, killing a number of men, women, and children. Known as the Ludlow Massacre, this violent chapter of American labor history is the climax of David Mason’s new book, Ludlow: A Verse-Novel ($18.95 Red Hen). Mason, who comes from a long line of Coloradoans, employs loose blank verse to create vivid portraits of those who lived and worked in that difficult environment, many of them immigrants, and to tell a saga that has captivated him for decades. He explains in his illuminating afterword -– “I wanted to use the drive, economy and rhythms of verse to make a compelling version of a story I could not get out of my system.” And so he has -– “No one who grew up as Luisa had / in coal camps from Trinidad to Pueblo, / watching the typhoid rake through families, / could say she’d never seen a beaten man.” Mason’s inclusion of himself through “interludes” makes this narrative in verse all the more moving.