ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry

Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ANGELA JACKSON is a Chicago poet, playwright, and novelist. She was named Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020. She has received numerous honors for both fiction and poetry, including the Pushcart Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. Her poetry collection, All These Roads Be Luminous, was nominated for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, Where I Must Go, won the American Book Award. In addition to Comfort Stew, Jackson has written three other plays: Witness!, Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love, and Lightfoot: The Crystal Stair.

REVIEWS

"Hopefully this large collection will earn for Angela Jackson the extensive enthusiasm she has long deserved. She is a poet, novelist, and playwright who has known, for long, what is right for her attention and scrupulous investigation." —Gwendolyn Brooks

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"This is an impressive and intelligent book that makes my skin crawl." —Harvard Review

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"Jackson's ear is keen; her memory of traditions is crystal clear." —Feminist Bookstore News

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknolwedgments
Lily Looking for a Redcap
Journal Entry: August 31, 1983
Transformable Prophecy
The Spider Speaks on the Need for Solidarity
Arachnia: Her Side of the Story
The Special Spider
Empty Parlor Blues
Prophet of the Ark
Why the Dark Ones Tremble
Billie in Silk
In Her Solitude: The Inca Divining Spider
Work: African-American Woman Guild
Conjugal Bed: African-American Woman Guild
Fannie (of Fannie Lou Hamer)
I Sit and Sew
Her Beatitude
Black Widow
The Problem in the Closet
Dementia Dexter
ALYO
The Spider Tells Her Horror Stories
Sexual Harassment
Art: African-American Woman Guild, or The Spider Explains Her Art to the Blind
Sweatshop of the Singing Hosts
The War Chant of the Architect
Totem: African-American Woman Guild
RockandRoll Monster: Down Home Blues Goes Hollywood
The Institutional Spider
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Climbs and Analyzes
The Dung Spider
The Aztec Spider: A Terrible Woman
Tarantula Revolts against the Gravedigging Wasp
Arachnophobia 1992
Sermon of the Middle-Aged Revolutionary Spider
The Cobweb Boat of the Columbia Spider
Scientists Gave a Group of Spiders LSD and Watched Them While They Wove Aberrant, against the Patterns of Nature
Spider Divine (of the Cameroons)
Lust: African-American Woman Guild
The Trick Is Not to Think: On the Art of Ballooning
The Skater
Blessing
Happily Ever After
Peace, Be Still

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