More Than Meat and Raiment
Poems
by Angela Jackson
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jan 15 2022 | Archive Date Jan 06 2022
Northwestern University Press | TriQuarterly
Talking about this book? Use #MoreThanMeatandRaiment #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
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.
Advance Praise
"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)
“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)
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9780810144569 |
PRICE | $20.00 (USD) |
PAGES | 192 |