What Yellow Sounds Like: Poems

by Linda Susan Jackson

What is most compelling about Linda Susan Jackson’s debut collection of poems, What Yellow Sounds Like, is the extraordinary self-possession of its young female narrator as she seeks to answer?who am I and to whom do I belong? These poems are about the process of shaping the identity of one girl who comes from “a line of technicolor women” who have “honey/suckle buried freely in the folds of their flesh,” a girl who comes from “men who bit their tongues,/ate dirt, dust and their pride. Worked anywhere,” and could “soar off the ground.”
The terrain of Jackson’s poems is particular, perilous, loving, humorous, passionate, uncompromising, contradictory—in other words, vastly human. The language is varied and inflected with the blues, and like the blues, pulls readers in through images and details that are both concrete and symbolic. Poem after poem charts the stages of this young girl’s development through her relationships with her family, her history, and the America into which she is born that is defined by race, skin color, gender, and class. The narrator develops a profound and essential connection to the legendary singer, Etta James, the “canary colored blues woman” and she recognizes the power in the sound of words as she recollects how Etta James “churned up her roar/to keep other women from dying.”  Near the end of the book, her great-grandmother tells her “Everything don’t need to be told.  Some things must.”  In this moment, the narrator is empowered to decide what to tell and to tell it in her own voice. These poems celebrate the sheer will and determination of the self to seek out and find who or what it needs to grow and prosper.
 
Because she was homesick for the smell
of Virginia tobacco and pit-roasted hog;
because she longed to hear her big brother
scratch out blues on his box; because
she craved the feel of corn silk
and had six stair-step children
before she was twenty-five,
she went to the funerals of strangers.
-from Family Outing

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2007

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was amazed at how few people had read this book on Goodreads. It was really good. I happened to get an old autographed copy from 2008. It begins with a poem called "Prologue" about the author's birth. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. Her father and mother are black. Everyone involved seems to look over each other's shoulders, afraid to confront the issue. Many of the poems deal with the great blues singer Etta James who also had a similar look.

[Alarie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew Etta James was a popular singer and had heard her recording of "At Last," which I just now played on YouTube. That was about the extent of what I knew until I read What Yellow Sounds Like. Linda Susan Jackson focuses on her central theme of Ms. James, but works in her own family, her own story, and how growing up in a dominant White culture affected yellow v. black toned minorities. I found this collection entertaining and enlightening.

One of my favorite poems is written in the voice of Etta James:

"Chile,

Why in the hell you botherin' me now?
Seem to me, you old enough to know a thing or two.

At your age, I thought I knew it all.
Turns out I didn't know shit but that a song
had to be more than words, had to have
attitude. Billie had that. Ain't had but a four
or five note range, but she had laid them notes
out for you, girl. Naked. And you gave 'em back
with a skirt on. Took me thirty years
to understand where that came from...."

[Tara Betts]

Such a cohesive first collection brimming with jazzy, sassy mischief and life lessons.