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Underlife
The dynamics of race, family, motherhood, career, sex and ultimately, transformation are explored in this debut collection. Underlife represents the wilderness of thought and emotion hidden away from the external world. Through O Neil s narratives we see our lives as if for the first time."
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2009
49 people want to read
About the author
January Gill O'Neil
8 books60 followersJanuary Gill O’Neil is a poet whose work explores the afterlives of history in American landscapes and intimate lives. Her poems trace how place, memory, and moral inheritance shape identity across generations, joining lyric precision with documentary attention and restraint.
She is the author of four poetry collections published by CavanKerry Press: Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009). Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.
A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member. She earned her B.A. at Old Dominion University and her M.F.A. at New York University.
Watch Glitter Road: A Poet's Journey with January Gill O'Neil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj_GC...
She is the author of four poetry collections published by CavanKerry Press: Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009). Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.
A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member. She earned her B.A. at Old Dominion University and her M.F.A. at New York University.
Watch Glitter Road: A Poet's Journey with January Gill O'Neil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj_GC...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 26, 2014
This is a little off-format because I wrote this as part of a book tour for my blog. Still, here goes . . . .
I liked many of the poems in January O'Neil's "Underlife," but I’m going to talk about just one, “Old Dog,” which January has permitted me to re-post.
Old Dog
Sounder! Here girl. Come . . .
He shouts to me like I’m a coon dog
chasing possums out in the fields.
The school’s back lot became a small country where
names were given but not deserved
and I took it and took it,
even laughed with everyone else
at my own black self, suffering like most of us suffered –
quietly. The laughter so loud you forgot homework,
the blue-and-white uniforms, red veils worn in church,
Jesus on a beaded noose in our pockets.
Today, on this purgatory of a cloudy day,
I stare blankly into an open meadow from my desk
as wind kicks up dust and memory;
more so, the chance to recall
a small morsel of a boy and his big mouth
and my harsh resolve to talk back,
even if it’s nothing more than this,
a romp through a few stanzas.
I am grateful for that old dog of memory –
for what it lets you keep
and what it lets you throw away.
Of all the things I like about this poem, what impresses me most is the grace with which the poet handles the topic. Thirty or 40 years ago, the situation addressed here was called “getting picked on” – it wasn’t called “abuse” or “bullying,” now punishable by a jail sentence. I could launch into a tirade about how folks today should get their shit together and stop calling themselves “victims” every time the cashier shorts them 4 cents at 7-Eleven. But I’ll restrain myself, because here is a person who “took it and took it” and could have ended up lynched like Jesus in stanza 3 but instead shrugged it off, an act that these days seems to demand superhuman effort.
Those last two lines killed me. The speaker gives the occasion what she considers its due, tossing it in the garbage where it belongs, and all that without showing her claws, without loosening a sluice of expletives, without malice or really much trace of resentment at all. So while this poem is a personal triumph, it’s also an ode to reason, balance and sanity, and it’s also a great long raft of fresh air.
In a post few days back, another reviewer said the reader would find herself in these pages. The poem went for me beyond the points I’ve mentioned because some decades ago in a parallel universe, I was the one white girl in my grade school class. I kept a very low profile and put up with my share of taunting. I remember being followed home one day by a clutch of kids who had a chant that started “Black is beautiful / white is shit / if you don’t believe….,” and I have to say I’d forgotten all about that, and maybe there’s a poem in it somewhere and please god may I emerge as gracefully as January has.
I liked many of the poems in January O'Neil's "Underlife," but I’m going to talk about just one, “Old Dog,” which January has permitted me to re-post.
Old Dog
Sounder! Here girl. Come . . .
He shouts to me like I’m a coon dog
chasing possums out in the fields.
The school’s back lot became a small country where
names were given but not deserved
and I took it and took it,
even laughed with everyone else
at my own black self, suffering like most of us suffered –
quietly. The laughter so loud you forgot homework,
the blue-and-white uniforms, red veils worn in church,
Jesus on a beaded noose in our pockets.
Today, on this purgatory of a cloudy day,
I stare blankly into an open meadow from my desk
as wind kicks up dust and memory;
more so, the chance to recall
a small morsel of a boy and his big mouth
and my harsh resolve to talk back,
even if it’s nothing more than this,
a romp through a few stanzas.
I am grateful for that old dog of memory –
for what it lets you keep
and what it lets you throw away.
Of all the things I like about this poem, what impresses me most is the grace with which the poet handles the topic. Thirty or 40 years ago, the situation addressed here was called “getting picked on” – it wasn’t called “abuse” or “bullying,” now punishable by a jail sentence. I could launch into a tirade about how folks today should get their shit together and stop calling themselves “victims” every time the cashier shorts them 4 cents at 7-Eleven. But I’ll restrain myself, because here is a person who “took it and took it” and could have ended up lynched like Jesus in stanza 3 but instead shrugged it off, an act that these days seems to demand superhuman effort.
Those last two lines killed me. The speaker gives the occasion what she considers its due, tossing it in the garbage where it belongs, and all that without showing her claws, without loosening a sluice of expletives, without malice or really much trace of resentment at all. So while this poem is a personal triumph, it’s also an ode to reason, balance and sanity, and it’s also a great long raft of fresh air.
In a post few days back, another reviewer said the reader would find herself in these pages. The poem went for me beyond the points I’ve mentioned because some decades ago in a parallel universe, I was the one white girl in my grade school class. I kept a very low profile and put up with my share of taunting. I remember being followed home one day by a clutch of kids who had a chant that started “Black is beautiful / white is shit / if you don’t believe….,” and I have to say I’d forgotten all about that, and maybe there’s a poem in it somewhere and please god may I emerge as gracefully as January has.
May 10, 2013
I have to honestly admit that I have been disappointed in my searches through small press collections of poetry. This one was nice but eventually forgettable. I must be missing something because every time I read the reviews, everyone loves the poems.
I want poetry to rock my world a bit more than it has been doing. No wonder most people don't like to read poetry books.
In "What Mommy Wants", Ms. O'Neil ended with these lines:
I want my husband to strip me naked
bend me over
leaving on just my Candie's
as if he were cheating on his wife
and getting away with it.
That kind of expresses how I feel about poetry. I want it to ravish me a bit more, not bore me so much.
I want poetry to rock my world a bit more than it has been doing. No wonder most people don't like to read poetry books.
In "What Mommy Wants", Ms. O'Neil ended with these lines:
I want my husband to strip me naked
bend me over
leaving on just my Candie's
as if he were cheating on his wife
and getting away with it.
That kind of expresses how I feel about poetry. I want it to ravish me a bit more, not bore me so much.
March 7, 2010
Fantastic first book of poems!
July 14, 2017
She cried out with a sound that bleached me
February 5, 2012
Bias: the author/poet is my friend!
Review: I enjoy how this book of poetry is arranged in stages of life -which give me the impression that I am growing/aging/changing with each poem I read. Also, so satisfying to read the work of a Black poet that doesn't focus on the plight of Black poets/everybodyelse, but on this individual person, her individual experience. And so many poems that make you go "mm!" but never, "hmm?"
Review: I enjoy how this book of poetry is arranged in stages of life -which give me the impression that I am growing/aging/changing with each poem I read. Also, so satisfying to read the work of a Black poet that doesn't focus on the plight of Black poets/everybodyelse, but on this individual person, her individual experience. And so many poems that make you go "mm!" but never, "hmm?"
April 28, 2010
January O'Neil's poems place you fully within the world they create. Intimate and full of the music of words. A pleasure to read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews