Red Clay Suite

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

paper, 0-8093-2760-0, $14.95t
978-0-8093-2760-7
80 pages, 6 x 9
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry-
Open Competition Award
John Tribble, series editor
Poetry

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Exploring the actual and imaginary landscape of the American South

In her third book of poems, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues, use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma.  Now, in Red Clay Suite, Jeffers approaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia—a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four “bars” of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation. 

Driving Interstate West through Georgia

Already I am an outsider, a visitor
seldom and hasty to my community
of pecan, cedar, pine, oak. A forgetful witness
to the smell of peaches liquoring the air.

I see this land the way I remember
and do the same for childhood love—
the rough hand that touched me
but didn’t scrape down to bone.

Like those Africans choking down
mouthfuls of home before they were loaded
onto the boats, this place
might be gone from me soon.

The clucking of grown folks’
voices as they prayed over daily meat,
the branch cradling the blood’s neck,
patch of green fed by offhand screams.

If this earth is denied me, then what do I know?
That before you travel to the prairie’s fields,
you must follow the southern tangle?
That if you try to pull up something

unfinished from the ground, the clotted
sounds of lament will cling to the roots?

 

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“Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading Honorée Jeffers’s poems knows that she’s a blues poet with things to say and new ways of saying them. Red Clay Suite is her best book to date, and a triumph; she uses everyday language and she makes it sing.”

—Ed Ochester, editor of American Poetry Now: The Pitt Poetry Series Anthology and author of Unreconstructed: Poems New and Selected

“Honorée Jeffers leads with her ear and follows with her rigorous intellect, then adds an emotional depth and fearlessnessthat make her poems uniquely powerful. This brilliant third book is a thinking woman’s blues that continues to challenge, delight, and terrify.”

—Elizabeth Alexander, author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated American Sublime

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, is the author of two other books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues.