✍ Scribed by Linda Susan Jackson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
A stunning sophomore release, Linda Susan Jackson’s newest poetry collection, Truth be Told, looks at the myriad treasures and complexities of Black womanhood by channeling an eclectic cast whose rich interactions testify to the timeless neglect of girlhood, the bond of long-term friendship and the responsibilities of authorship. Here Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist from The Bluest Eye, addresses herself directly to Toni Morrison and connects, over time and space, with Persephone, a girl herself, cycling always toward the seasons, caught between an overbearing mother, an incomprehensible father and a grooming god; Lot’s wife sets the record straight about turning back; and our speaker writes to and through her lineage, memorializing her great-grandmother’s distilled wisdom and others who have impacted her, such as when she writes to the great blues singer, Etta James. In a meticulous inventory of our world and its historical inheritance, Jackson makes an undaunted cartographer, mapping “here: rag-wicked IED” to “there: t-shaped IUD,” from “here: the mother I longed for” to “ there: the mother I had.” If Jackson recognizes the distance between our ideals and our reality as a kind of tragedy, she also resists despair, enjoining us to close the gap with hope for the future and to: “Step here: light the fire/ Step there: fire the cannon.” Every poem is a spark struck, a cannonade hailing the resilient and enigmatic joy of language. “After decades with no history,” Jackson sagely celebrates, “That I sing at all is a mystery.” A mystery, yes, but moreover — a blessing for those of us enthralled by her song of love.
Contents
Prologue
From Here to There
I
Pecola’s Juggernaut
Chores
Ruint
Like We Know
Pecola Questions Us
Camera-Ready
Dear Miss Chloé Miss Toni Morrison,
Scene One, Take Two
Sun-born
View-Master
Dear Pecola (part 1),
Dear Pecola (part 2),
Dear Pecola (part 3),
Dear Pecola (part 4),
II
More Than Drylongso
III
Persephone Meets Pecola
Enfleurage
Nowhere to Run
Center Stage
Persephone’s Theory
Sephie’s Clock of the Long Now
When Persephone Has the Blues
IV
Girls to Women
Girls to Women Redux
Lost & Found
Threnody
May 12, 2009
Sum of the Parts
Nailing Things Down
On the Lower Frequency
What Good Is a Castle
Why’d She Turn?
Epilogue
Main Sequence
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