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.

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— -

“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)— -

“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— -