Northwestern University Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-0-8101-4457-6 | Paper: 978-0-8101-4456-9 Library of Congress Classification PS3560.A179M67 2022 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Angela Jackson returns with a poetic collage that draws on imagery from the African American South and the South Side of Chicago, storytelling, the Black Arts Movement, and Hausa folklore. Deftly intertwining narrative and free verse, she expresses the complexities, beauty, and haunts of the multilayered Black voice. Jackson offers a stirring mixture of the music, food, and soul that have come to characterize her lyrical work.
The speakers of these poems reflect on memory and saga, history and legend. Voices recall evenings spent catching fireflies with a younger sister, the aroma of homemade rolls, the father who squeezes papers into his wallet alongside bills in order to appear wealthy (“a flock of green birds rustling inside / to get out for some extravagance”). A Black girl watches TV and dreams of the perfect partner. A citizen contends with the unrelenting devastation of police violence in a work reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “verse journalism.” A mother loses her daughter only to witness her rebirth: “Praise be / the human being / that is being.”
In “For Our People,” an homage to Margaret Walker, Jackson summons the resilience and imagination of African Americans, celebrating “each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or betrayed, muted / and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each a private star beloved in the universe.” Lauded as one of American poetry’s most vivid voices, Jackson continues her reign among the country’s foremost wordsmiths. This sublime collection delves deep into the porch stories and folktales that have carried the Black voice through all its histories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
ANGELA JACKSON is a Chicago poet, playwright, and novelist who has received numerous honors for both fiction and poetry. And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (TriQuarterly, 1998) was nominated for the National Book Award, and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems (TriQuarterly, 2015) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, among other honors. Her debut work of fiction, Where I Must Go: A Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2009), won the American Book Award, and its sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads: A Novel (TriQuarterly, 2017), won the 2018 John Gardner Fiction Prize. The author of four plays, including Comfort Stew (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Jackson currently serves as the Illinois Poet Laureate.
REVIEWS
“James Baldwin called for 'a sentence as clean as a bone.' In her rangy new collection, Angela Jackson not only heeds that call but pushes past it, into subjects as elemental as bone—deeper than flesh, more essential than clothes. Peeling away surface layers to unveil raw truths, Jackson presents both the 'terror and delight' of African American experience. A poet whose courage matches her craft, Jackson offers a book of 'intelligent toughness,' written 'under the pressure of impregnable loss and dear / inherited hope.'” —Gregory Fraser, author of Little Armageddon: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2021)
“From Mississippi to Chicago, and all the peoples in-between, this is a collection that can help us companion each other.” —C.T. Salazar, The Clarion-Ledger— -
“Jackson’s oeuvre is needed more than ever. Her poems stream over a reader like cool, salty ocean waves, but like the ocean, they are full of depth and wonder.” —Luis J. Rodríguez, author of Borrowed Bones: New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles (Curbstone, 2016)
“Angela Jackson’s dazzling poems express the tenderness and pain of growing up in Chicago during the Great Migration, and embark upon a much larger exploration of Black women, especially as mothers. She brings us complicated and deeply personal portraits of lives in all their ‘sweets, pleasantries, entities, and evil ways.’ That same clear-eyed vision turns in an instant to searing indictments of the systems built on racial and gender inequality. More Than Meat and Raiment is a powerful and beautiful book that adds to Angela Jackson’s impressive body of work.” —Mike Puican, author of Central Air: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2020)— -
PRAISE FOR ANGELA JACKSON
“Angela Jackson’s poems dwell in fervid topographies of family and myth, heart and tongue.” —Kevin Stein, author of Wrestling Li Po for the Remote
“Angela Jackson is a state treasure. She is a celebrated poet, novelist, biographer, playwright and professor whose work demonstrates the importance of vivid writing and inspirational literature to American life.” —John Shaw, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale
“Like the magician she is, [she] constantly surprises us with an unforeseen twist that turns cliché and commonality into manna and nectar.” —Black Book Review
“Jackson's ear is keen; her memory of traditions is crystal clear.” —Feminist Bookstore News
“Ms. Jackson owns a special and singular voice, it is clear music and breath.” —Haki R. Madhubuti, author of YellowBlack:The First Twenty-One Years Of A Poet’s Life, A Memoir
“Possessed of ancestral memory and foresight, she takes in the world with a lens as wide as Whitman’s, conjuring both history and the present moment from a tall and monumental place: the shoulders of Langston, Gwendolyn, Baldwin.” —Connie May Fowler, author of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly— -
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hero House
The Guide
Heat wave
Higher Ground
He Was a Trained Carpenter
A Country Girl
Beside the House
The Garden
Tenants
Madaddy and the Honduran Mau
Overnight
Summer and the City
Homemade Rolls
Novenas
Bills
Christmas Eves
Club DeLisa
Not your Government Name
Hot Fun in the Summertime
The Eiffel Towers
Hero – House
One of the Guys
A Portion of the Story
After the Killing
Love in High Places
The Wisdom of Ghosts
After Ablution
Bellwether
Blizzard, 2011
The House on Wentworth Avenue
The Memory Borrower
Vacant Lot
Frappe Toast
Sacred Heart: Atriptych
O, Mama
The Flowering Bamboo
Wishbone Wish
Thread Unwinds
A Beloved Girl Begins
A Mother Muses
Destitution
Goodness is its Own Reward
As I Walk I Sing
God Don’t Like Ugly
Is This the Breeding Ground for Bitter Men?
Three Little Birds
Pausing for Elimination
The Dead Speak
What is the Difference
Sumptuous Meals
Upon Reflection
Knock, Knock
The Three Little Birds
Being a good mother
Going Straight on the Right
The Three Birds in the Tree
I Keep on Going, Going to the Right
A New Sky
Welcome!
In the Morning
What the little birds said –
After Work
Glimmering Sparks
Caress
God is God
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Motive is Everything
The Act
A Girl’s Folly
What She Said as She Was Grinding her Up
A Daughter’s Bones Remember
Musings
A Bird in a Tree
She Moved in Command
Party Time
As She Strutted
She Turned a Deaf Ear
A Bird Tweeted
The Way it Went
The Arch-Bishop Bull
She Kicked Back Reclining
Hot Mess
High Noon
Call Her Consequence, Call Her Karma, Call Her on the Run
Curious Mother
A Half Girl
Who Signed My Name In Blood
Girls at Play
Coda
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Northwestern University Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-0-8101-4457-6 Paper: 978-0-8101-4456-9
Angela Jackson returns with a poetic collage that draws on imagery from the African American South and the South Side of Chicago, storytelling, the Black Arts Movement, and Hausa folklore. Deftly intertwining narrative and free verse, she expresses the complexities, beauty, and haunts of the multilayered Black voice. Jackson offers a stirring mixture of the music, food, and soul that have come to characterize her lyrical work.
The speakers of these poems reflect on memory and saga, history and legend. Voices recall evenings spent catching fireflies with a younger sister, the aroma of homemade rolls, the father who squeezes papers into his wallet alongside bills in order to appear wealthy (“a flock of green birds rustling inside / to get out for some extravagance”). A Black girl watches TV and dreams of the perfect partner. A citizen contends with the unrelenting devastation of police violence in a work reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “verse journalism.” A mother loses her daughter only to witness her rebirth: “Praise be / the human being / that is being.”
In “For Our People,” an homage to Margaret Walker, Jackson summons the resilience and imagination of African Americans, celebrating “each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or betrayed, muted / and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each a private star beloved in the universe.” Lauded as one of American poetry’s most vivid voices, Jackson continues her reign among the country’s foremost wordsmiths. This sublime collection delves deep into the porch stories and folktales that have carried the Black voice through all its histories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
ANGELA JACKSON is a Chicago poet, playwright, and novelist who has received numerous honors for both fiction and poetry. And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (TriQuarterly, 1998) was nominated for the National Book Award, and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems (TriQuarterly, 2015) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, among other honors. Her debut work of fiction, Where I Must Go: A Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2009), won the American Book Award, and its sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads: A Novel (TriQuarterly, 2017), won the 2018 John Gardner Fiction Prize. The author of four plays, including Comfort Stew (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Jackson currently serves as the Illinois Poet Laureate.
REVIEWS
“James Baldwin called for 'a sentence as clean as a bone.' In her rangy new collection, Angela Jackson not only heeds that call but pushes past it, into subjects as elemental as bone—deeper than flesh, more essential than clothes. Peeling away surface layers to unveil raw truths, Jackson presents both the 'terror and delight' of African American experience. A poet whose courage matches her craft, Jackson offers a book of 'intelligent toughness,' written 'under the pressure of impregnable loss and dear / inherited hope.'” —Gregory Fraser, author of Little Armageddon: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2021)
“From Mississippi to Chicago, and all the peoples in-between, this is a collection that can help us companion each other.” —C.T. Salazar, The Clarion-Ledger— -
“Jackson’s oeuvre is needed more than ever. Her poems stream over a reader like cool, salty ocean waves, but like the ocean, they are full of depth and wonder.” —Luis J. Rodríguez, author of Borrowed Bones: New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles (Curbstone, 2016)
“Angela Jackson’s dazzling poems express the tenderness and pain of growing up in Chicago during the Great Migration, and embark upon a much larger exploration of Black women, especially as mothers. She brings us complicated and deeply personal portraits of lives in all their ‘sweets, pleasantries, entities, and evil ways.’ That same clear-eyed vision turns in an instant to searing indictments of the systems built on racial and gender inequality. More Than Meat and Raiment is a powerful and beautiful book that adds to Angela Jackson’s impressive body of work.” —Mike Puican, author of Central Air: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2020)— -
PRAISE FOR ANGELA JACKSON
“Angela Jackson’s poems dwell in fervid topographies of family and myth, heart and tongue.” —Kevin Stein, author of Wrestling Li Po for the Remote
“Angela Jackson is a state treasure. She is a celebrated poet, novelist, biographer, playwright and professor whose work demonstrates the importance of vivid writing and inspirational literature to American life.” —John Shaw, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale
“Like the magician she is, [she] constantly surprises us with an unforeseen twist that turns cliché and commonality into manna and nectar.” —Black Book Review
“Jackson's ear is keen; her memory of traditions is crystal clear.” —Feminist Bookstore News
“Ms. Jackson owns a special and singular voice, it is clear music and breath.” —Haki R. Madhubuti, author of YellowBlack:The First Twenty-One Years Of A Poet’s Life, A Memoir
“Possessed of ancestral memory and foresight, she takes in the world with a lens as wide as Whitman’s, conjuring both history and the present moment from a tall and monumental place: the shoulders of Langston, Gwendolyn, Baldwin.” —Connie May Fowler, author of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly— -
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hero House
The Guide
Heat wave
Higher Ground
He Was a Trained Carpenter
A Country Girl
Beside the House
The Garden
Tenants
Madaddy and the Honduran Mau
Overnight
Summer and the City
Homemade Rolls
Novenas
Bills
Christmas Eves
Club DeLisa
Not your Government Name
Hot Fun in the Summertime
The Eiffel Towers
Hero – House
One of the Guys
A Portion of the Story
After the Killing
Love in High Places
The Wisdom of Ghosts
After Ablution
Bellwether
Blizzard, 2011
The House on Wentworth Avenue
The Memory Borrower
Vacant Lot
Frappe Toast
Sacred Heart: Atriptych
O, Mama
The Flowering Bamboo
Wishbone Wish
Thread Unwinds
A Beloved Girl Begins
A Mother Muses
Destitution
Goodness is its Own Reward
As I Walk I Sing
God Don’t Like Ugly
Is This the Breeding Ground for Bitter Men?
Three Little Birds
Pausing for Elimination
The Dead Speak
What is the Difference
Sumptuous Meals
Upon Reflection
Knock, Knock
The Three Little Birds
Being a good mother
Going Straight on the Right
The Three Birds in the Tree
I Keep on Going, Going to the Right
A New Sky
Welcome!
In the Morning
What the little birds said –
After Work
Glimmering Sparks
Caress
God is God
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Motive is Everything
The Act
A Girl’s Folly
What She Said as She Was Grinding her Up
A Daughter’s Bones Remember
Musings
A Bird in a Tree
She Moved in Command
Party Time
As She Strutted
She Turned a Deaf Ear
A Bird Tweeted
The Way it Went
The Arch-Bishop Bull
She Kicked Back Reclining
Hot Mess
High Noon
Call Her Consequence, Call Her Karma, Call Her on the Run
Curious Mother
A Half Girl
Who Signed My Name In Blood
Girls at Play
Coda
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE