More Than Meat and Raiment Synopsis
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.
About This Edition
| ISBN: | 9780810144569 |
| Publication date: | 30th January 2022 |
| Author: | Angela Jackson |
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 240 pages |
| Primary Genre | Poetry by individual poets |
Other editions of this book
ISBN: 9780810144569
Publication date: 30/01/2022
Format: Paperback
About Angela Jackson
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 ...
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