Vessel: Poems

by Parneshia Jones

Overview

WINNER OF THE MIDWEST BOOK AWARD

The imagination of a girl, the retelling of family stories, and the unfolding of a rich and often painful history: Parneshia Jones’s debut collection explores the intersections of these elements of experience with refreshing candor and metaphorical purpose.

A child of the South speaking in the rhythms of Chicago, Jones knits “a human quilt” with herself at the center. She relates everything from the awkward trip to Marshall Fields with her mother to buy her first bra to the late whiskey-infused nights of her father’s world. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento.” Jones intertwines the stories of her own family with those of historical black figures, including Marvin Gaye and Josephine Baker. Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, these poems mine the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319142
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	04/07/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	497 KB

About the Author

Parneshia Jones is a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. Her work has been anthologized in publications including, She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems, edited by Caroline Kennedy and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, edited by Nikky Finney. Jones is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and serves on the board of Cave Canem and Global Writes. She currently holds positions as Sales and Subsidiary Rights Manager and Poetry Editor at Northwestern University Press. Vessel is her debut poetry collection. She lives in Evanston, IL.

Table of Contents

Girl 3

I

Definition 7

Naiad 8

"Fair Trade" 10

Legacy 13

Dream Catcher 14

O.W. Starling 16

For the Basement Parties at the YMCA 18

Bra Shopping 20

II

Congregation 27

French Kiss 29

Milk and Honey: Marvin Gaye 33

Two Lovers and a Pot of Collard Greens 36

Hearing Sylvia Plath's Voice, Circa 1962 38

Haikus to Younger Self: A Suite 40

III

Haiku for Bernice, Louisiana 45

The Understudy 46

Blink 48

Bitter Smell of Ashes 51

Georgia on My Mind 53

House of Cards 55

Legend of the Buffalo Poets 58

Litany: Chicago Summers 60

IV

Still Memory 65

Habit: Salt 67

Chicago Style Italian Beef 71

Instinct 73

Ode to Bourbon: A Writer's Distillery 74

Torching the Stage: Mitchell L.H. Douglas and Donny Hathaway Meet 76

Tender 78

V

Auto-Correcting History 81

Shutter 83

Resurrection under the Moon 85

Diva Suite Black Venus: Josephine Baker 88

Nannarella: Anna Magnani 92

The Mother 94

Lesson Plan 95

Editorial Reviews

03/16/2015
Jones, recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, presents a debut collection that doubles as a bildungsroman in verse. Much of the book takes the form of love letters to Jones’s youth, her family, and Chicago, as she pays homage to the city’s people, summers, and even its food. As she explores questions of identity, such as the way her first name shaped her perception of herself as a little girl, Jones writes with a casual, yet intentional, storyteller’s tone that eases the reader into her narratives. The poems often feel like modern-day creation myths, and throughout the book she flirts with nostalgia while capturing the small details of the past, including a party in the early 1990s in the basement of a YMCA. Some poems push too far into sentimentality as they express her love for a grandmother or memory of a first kiss, and Jones sometimes summarizes instead of challenging the reader to examine the images she presents. Her poems find greatest success when she follows her ear: “Some were never found,/ soft bones swept under moss trees/ The missing and ache sweat/ across the foreheads of fathers/ reckoning nightmares.” Jones has an unusual gift for capturing place and time, and she demonstrates a deep affinity for the subtleties of description. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Vessel

Midwest Book Award Winner

"In the poems of Parneshia Jones, the lines of black history that angled north from the Deep South after the First World War empty into the bruised and tender histories of family and community."—Soujourners

"In the tradition of Brooks, Hansberry, Danner, and Walker, Parneshia Jones, dutiful daughter and attentive poet-witness of the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930 - 1950) imagines and serves memory to us out of a teeming black skillet of life. There is something about a black girl born and raised in Chicago, with a pencil behind her ear, that alters the alphabet from finite to infinite. Jones has written a sweet unforgettable first child.”—Nikky Finney, author of Head Off & Split

"Parneshia Jones is pure literary juke — a record's smoothest rotation, the roll steady of the Gulf. She's cool Chicago late nights and the slow crawl of Sunday morning in New Orleans. Parneshia is a world of a woman — Renaissance Conjure Priestess of planet earth and the way way beyond. We want her words filling our shelves, our lungs, our hearts. Eyes forward; hands on the wheel — Parneshia Jones knows every curve of the road, the byway, highway — and we’re always along for the ride."—Ellen Hagan, author of Hemisphere

"Our need to tell stories comes from an almost equal need for hard truths and Parneshia Jones’s gorgeous poetry collection, Vessel, is full of bold lyricism and elegant storytelling. Her poems force us to question our skin politics, our bent up genealogies, our gender binaries, and the ways these artifices stack up to weigh us down. Whether the imperative is coming from Mae West, Sylvia Plath, or Jones herself, these poems make clear that 'The screams behind the voice reveal her truth.' Right now, when it can be so difficult to be heard over all of the alarmingly vocal racism and sexism, we need Jones’s fearless poems to speak for us."—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

“From bra shopping to haiku to a tribute to Josephine Baker, Parneshia Jones touches all poetic bases in this pioneering book. Whether the scene is somewhere in Mississippi or in today's Chicago, she gives us a panorama that only a young inspired black woman could create, not sociologically but poetically. That's as rare these days as visionary poetry itself, but Parneshia Jones does it. She puts the music back into language with an energy that sings off the page.”—Samuel Hazo, author of Once for the Last Bandit

From the Publisher