More Than Meat and Raiment

Poems
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8101-4456-9
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 272 g

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 using narrative and free verse, she artfully 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 as one of 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jackson, Angela

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 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

Über Autor(innen)

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, while 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.