Angela Jackson: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1990s, 2020s, 2023]

Angela Jackson (1951–present) is a poet, playwright, and novelist who has earned many honors for fiction and poetry, including a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Her debut novel, Where I Must Go (Triquarterly, 2009), won the American Book Award. Jackson's work speaks to traditions and myths of the African diaspora as well as her own and collective histories of her native Chicago, particularly in her collection More Than Meat and Raiment (Triquarterly, 2022).

Angela Jackson’s imaginative writing elaborates on Chicago’s powerful mix of aspiration and desperation, especially on the part of Black Americans—those who made their way to the city during the Great Migration and those living in the legacy of that journey.

—from "On Angela Jackson: A True Daughter of the Great Migration," by Patricia Spears Jones, published in Poetry, April 2023

Angela Jackson's selected poems in order of publication

1990s

"Angel" (1998)

Don’t mess with me: you hurt yourself.
In the middle of my stride now. I am walking
yes indeed I am walking through my own house.

In “Angel,” Jackson engages with biblical imagery, specifically Moses’s narrative, to illustrate ancestral inheritance and the violence of the African diaspora. She steps into her own agency, like a suit of cosmic armor, describing her head as “the burning bush,” a symbol of miraculous energy, clarity, and illumination. Unlike the Israelites who were condemned to wander the wilderness, “we walk without wandering.” The speaker holds the promised land in her palms, and she is rooted and immovable: “And we walk without wandering like people named / after mere plants, / because we are tree / and high-stepping roots.” She is where she is now because of the resilience and perseverance of her ancestors, who watch over her, and she continues to carry their beacon. The speaker says “toting my own load / and yours and mine…Come hell and high water. / We don’t break / for nothing.” Her ardor and graceful pride echo like a chorus in a canyon; her words are persimmons “falling free,” lightning that sets the earth aflame and anoints the soil from where she stands: “Don’t mess with me: you hurt yourself.” 

"Miz Rosa Rides the Bus" (1998)

It was not like they all say. Miss Liberty Muffet
she didn’t
jump at the sight of me.
Not exactly.

Angela Jackson masterfully opens this persona poem in the spirited voice of Rosa Parks, legendary civil rights activist. Jackson compares images of the Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme, from the many legs of a spider to Miss Muffet jumping with surprise to Rosa’s experience of refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955. Rosa boards the bus headed home after toiling as a seamstress, her body sore and swollen: “My feets were tired. My eyes were / sore. My heart was raw from hemming / dirty edges of Miss L. Muffet’s garment.”

Jackson’s Rosa succinctly and comically likens the white passenger to an affronted Little Miss Muffet/Miss Liberty hybrid, combining two quintessential figures of white America, and compares herself to the harmless spider that scares her. Rosa’s rightful defiance sparked the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott a few days later. Toward the end of Jackson’s poem, Rosa meditates on Jim Crow, referring to oppressive anti-integration laws of southern states after the Civil War, and lingering racial injustice, though it wears a different form: “Jim Crow dies and ravens come with crumbs. / They say—Eat and be satisfied. / I fast and pray and ride.”

2020s

"More Than Meat and Raiment" (2020)

All the stories you were ever told
All the stories you ever told
All the songs you ever heard sung
All the songs you could barely hum
All of these winding around inside you
Like a choir of remembrance.

Jackson’s innovative use of myth and lived experience weaves a memory quilt of songs and stories. In this poem, part of a longer work on African American myths forming the backbone of her 2022 book, Jackson reminds readers of human multiplicity, that they are “more than meat and raiment,” as this poem’s title and the title of her book suggest. Jackson untangles the essential threads of what makes us who we are, beyond “words or images…age the numeral / Or gender the sex or wish or race.” 

People constantly unfold like desire, which she describes as a firework “opening up this moment into a thousand thousands.” Jackon delights in the ability to be “a-blaze” and “a-bloom,” and she imbues music in each line as an incantation, strumming rhythms such as “Soul-piece, God-lamp, heart pumping red / Blooded blue blood true blood round / Bone of bones, bone of honor, bone of strength.” For Jackson, all people are both and and, “night and noon at once,” and she assures readers that “there will be more for you.”

From the Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

"Gwendolyn Brooks Visits Russia in 1982 (Version II)"(2023)

There is in Russia a history to witness.
She nods at the old hands,
What they have wrought.

Dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, this persona poem is in remembrance of the trailblazing literary icon and her piece “A Black Woman in Russia, '' published in 1996 in Report From Part Two. In it, Brooks recounts the camaraderie and tension she experienced while on a trip to Russia with a group of American writers that included Susan Sontag.

In Jackson’s interpretation of Brooks’s Russia, the “Speech / Gnarled” and lack of vibrance is palpable. As Brooks wanders the monochrome country, she notices “flowers are not variegated. Just one color” and “wishes for the splendor of Blackness.” In pondering Russia’s history, she watches passersby with quiet empathy: “There is in Russia a history to witness. She nods at the old hands, / What they have wrought.” On her flight home, Brooks is happy to delight in the “wild and wily / Youth of her own land,” proud to “Stand splendid. Black among the colors,” a descendant of people who “built / So much…And roads to build to the beautiful sun.” In embracing the richness of her heritage, Jackson through Brooks ruminates on how diversity strengthens a nation.