“Among the several poems in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell that stopped me cold is ‘The Polar Bear,’ in which a mother tries to protect her black child from the television news of racial unrest (riots, arrests, brutality) by turning his attention to The Discovery Channel. But there, a polar bear is fighting for survival surrounded by vicious walruses and melting ice. The boy clutches his stuffed white bear and asks if this is real. Life in the Arctic and life in the urban streets are conjoined, ecology and racism wed. Givhan is a poet of great heart and brave directness who writes real-life poems, sometimes crowded to the point of claustrophobia with the details of life in the poor lane. One poem transforms a laundromat woman living ‘paycheck to paycheck’ into a ‘god.’ Another poem is a stirring defense of cheerleaders, written without a drop of irony. A reader will be quick to trust the authority in this poet’s voice and the credentials of experience which are on full display.”

—Billy Collins

“In a second collection that beats with multiple hearts, Givhan (Landscape with Headless Mama) addresses complicated familial identity, writing of her own Mexican-American background, her mixed-race husband, and their adopted black child. The book is full of anxiety over the vulnerability of children, specifically her own child’s identity and how she can protect him. Givhan writes of the initial apprehension, “after the gauge of my uterus/ had fixed itself on empty.// I’d made peace with the threat of/ you’re not my ‘real’ mother.” She also confronts the racism embedded in the adoption process: how the “white ones cost ten grand more.” Throughout, Givhan exposes the enduring animosity and aggression towards biracial families, doing so with candor and sparkling language. Every line is tightly composed, and the sensory details pull the reader towards the poet as she recounts her splintered world—her past as well as the present world she creates and navigates as a woman and a mother of color. Chronicling the cruelty that children endure at the hands of adults, Givhan casts the eponymous spell for her son and her family. Givhan asks readers to witness racial inequity beside her and imagine a better future—how, we, too, have the power to cast a spell so that every human feels secure, safe, protected.”

—Publisher’s Weekly, Jan. 2017

“Protection spells typically deal with force and looking out for one’s self and others, two themes consistently at work in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell. Whether it is standing one’s ground regarding family, as in the sequence of poems dealing with a neighbor’s racially-charged accusations against the speaker’s husband, or empathizing with and speaking in the voices of figures past and present who have survived physical and cultural violence, the poems in this collection are alive with the complexity of wanting to protect while needing to be protected as well. These are poems that engage human experience beyond the binary of aggression and passivity, and reflect a world where the two sides blur.”

—José Angel Araguz, The Bind