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The Glory Gets
In her three previous, award-winning collections of blues poetry, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers has explored themes of African American history, Southern culture, and intergenerational trauma. Now, in her fourth and most accomplished collection, Jeffers turns to the task of seeking and reconciling the blues and its three movements--identification, exploration, and resolution--with wisdom. Poems in The Glory Gets ask, "What happens on the road to wisdom? What now in this bewildering place?" Using the metaphor of "gets"--the concessional returns of living--Jeffers travels this fraught yet exhilarating journey, employing unexpected improvisations while navigating womanhood. The spirit and spirituality of her muse, the late poet Lucille Clifton, guide the poet through the treacherous territories other women have encountered and survived yet kept secret from their daughters. An online reader's companion will be available.
- GenresPoetry
84 pages, Hardcover
First published May 11, 2015
About the author
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
22 books1,332 followersHonorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work examines culture, religion, race, and family. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (2000), won the Stan and Tom Wick poetry prize and was a 2001 Paterson Poetry prize finalist.
Jeffers’s poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002) and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (2002). Jeffers has also published fiction in the Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Story Quarterly.
The recipient of honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, Jeffers teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is an associate professor of English.
Jeffers’s poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002) and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (2002). Jeffers has also published fiction in the Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Story Quarterly.
The recipient of honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, Jeffers teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is an associate professor of English.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 30, 2016
There is some blessedness
each of us brings into a room
whether or not we sing
the praises of a named god
This most recent book by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is thick with witness: historical, spiritual, personal. Like the late great Lucille Clifton, to whom this volume is dedicated, Jeffers mixes colloquial and standard speech into a tapestry of formal brilliance. "Aching for your mean/ laughter all up in my face." Like Clifton, Jeffers composes "suites" of poems--small groupings that sing together in a particular timbre: fear, wit, beauty, blues... the latter grouping being also thematic, invoking the soul and spirit of Mary Magdalene attesting to her devotions: "Touch me not, you told me--/ & then, I knew you for a man."
Racism and its brutal legacy are not spared. In this book, we visit the myriad violences of America's apartheid: stereotypes, plantations, lynchings. With unshakable honesty and factual documentation, Jeffers unmasks the violence at the root of the American tree. She does not gloss the past but visits it straight on, a true deponent in the case against the bitter and constant recurrence of injustice. As a witness must, Jeffers testifies to all that is true: the right, the wrong, the personal, the political. "I will not stop calling," she writes, "I will not stop writing." Anger, yes. But also singing. Also the grace and power of the poetic imagination, which conjures, which dreams, which awakens.
each of us brings into a room
whether or not we sing
the praises of a named god
This most recent book by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is thick with witness: historical, spiritual, personal. Like the late great Lucille Clifton, to whom this volume is dedicated, Jeffers mixes colloquial and standard speech into a tapestry of formal brilliance. "Aching for your mean/ laughter all up in my face." Like Clifton, Jeffers composes "suites" of poems--small groupings that sing together in a particular timbre: fear, wit, beauty, blues... the latter grouping being also thematic, invoking the soul and spirit of Mary Magdalene attesting to her devotions: "Touch me not, you told me--/ & then, I knew you for a man."
Racism and its brutal legacy are not spared. In this book, we visit the myriad violences of America's apartheid: stereotypes, plantations, lynchings. With unshakable honesty and factual documentation, Jeffers unmasks the violence at the root of the American tree. She does not gloss the past but visits it straight on, a true deponent in the case against the bitter and constant recurrence of injustice. As a witness must, Jeffers testifies to all that is true: the right, the wrong, the personal, the political. "I will not stop calling," she writes, "I will not stop writing." Anger, yes. But also singing. Also the grace and power of the poetic imagination, which conjures, which dreams, which awakens.
June 30, 2016
Uplifting, Poetic, Engaging & Inspiring! A Remarkably Powerful Read! I Loved It!
September 2, 2021
My favorite poems in this collection were: "I End the Winter" and the five Magdalene poems. Powerful words.
January 13, 2022
“The soul has a body of its own and will walk left or right.”
Listen. We already know how much we love Honoree, so that goes without saying. I can tell you a story about how this book of poetry made me feel and I will. But to get its effect, it is something you need to experience for your self.
It is powerful as these poems journey through spiritual, historical, and even personal themes. Honoree is brilliant, and in the confines of these pages, she has streamed together in such an ethereal way the mere fact that through the exploration of history has an imprint of the present moment.
Poetry was the gateway to my love of writing. And Maya Angelou was one of the writers who and still does inspire me. As a kid I read through Maya Angelou’s work as if it alone gave me substance. When I first read I Know Why The Caged Birds Cry, it was like something lifted inside me…I can’t explain it any better than that. And when I read this back in 2016 for the first time, I felt that same feeling. The gift of being able to touch people with words is a gift that powerful. So to re-read this now, with having interacted with Honoree that feeling is parallel to peace. Peace in knowing that greatness resides not only in her work but in exactly who she is.
Lawd….I hope that all makes sense. Now GO READ THE BOOK
Listen. We already know how much we love Honoree, so that goes without saying. I can tell you a story about how this book of poetry made me feel and I will. But to get its effect, it is something you need to experience for your self.
It is powerful as these poems journey through spiritual, historical, and even personal themes. Honoree is brilliant, and in the confines of these pages, she has streamed together in such an ethereal way the mere fact that through the exploration of history has an imprint of the present moment.
Poetry was the gateway to my love of writing. And Maya Angelou was one of the writers who and still does inspire me. As a kid I read through Maya Angelou’s work as if it alone gave me substance. When I first read I Know Why The Caged Birds Cry, it was like something lifted inside me…I can’t explain it any better than that. And when I read this back in 2016 for the first time, I felt that same feeling. The gift of being able to touch people with words is a gift that powerful. So to re-read this now, with having interacted with Honoree that feeling is parallel to peace. Peace in knowing that greatness resides not only in her work but in exactly who she is.
Lawd….I hope that all makes sense. Now GO READ THE BOOK
August 18, 2015
Complicated, thoughtful explorations of how history--whether public ("Singing Counter") or personal ("Memory of One Day in a Kitchen")--impinges on the present moment. The book's divided into five sections ("fear," "beauty," "blues," "hoodoo," and "wit"), and although the divisions make sense for the poems contained in each part, some of the best moments in the book occur when the poems break down the distinctions among those categories.
I especially appreciated the poems that more overtly open up dialogues with other texts, both in form and content, as in "After, We'll Read the Bible" (which engages, well, the Bible), "If Free, Then" (which draws on Wallace Stevens' and Raymond R. Patterson's "Ways of Looking at.." poems), and "My Father as Walter Lee Younger" (a chilling pantoum that riffs off a line from A Raisin in the Sun).
I especially appreciated the poems that more overtly open up dialogues with other texts, both in form and content, as in "After, We'll Read the Bible" (which engages, well, the Bible), "If Free, Then" (which draws on Wallace Stevens' and Raymond R. Patterson's "Ways of Looking at.." poems), and "My Father as Walter Lee Younger" (a chilling pantoum that riffs off a line from A Raisin in the Sun).
February 5, 2016
Really beautiful book. Takes on the enormous task of breathing life into the historic and braiding it with the mythic. And it succeeds. Really remarkable.
February 22, 2022
The poetry collection explores many themes in African American culture. The 5 sections of the collection reflect the culture: fear, beauty, blues, hoodo and wit. The poems are inspired by historical events as well as literary figures such as William Shakespeare, Lorraine Hansberry, Lucille Clfton and Zora Neale Hurston. The poems I found most intriguing were inspired by the biblical figure, Mary Magdalene. Most of the poems are short, making this a quick read.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews