Outlandish Blues

by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Root-wise, soulful poems reinvent the domestic and spiritual spheres.

Winner of the Harper Lee Award (2018)

Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honor�e Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes, ''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 2003

About the author

Honorée 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.

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good poetry collection, many of them centered around women's blues especially their relationship with bad men. Jeffers biblical poems are amazing, she puts the blues in the mouths of women characters from the Bible such as Lot's wife, Sarah, Hagar. The title poem "Outlandish Blues" challenges how American slavery is portrayed in film, for example not showing children on slave ships, money changing hands between white enslavers and African traders, and the original religious traditions of enslaved Africans before they were introduced to Christianity.

Favorite poems: "The Battered Blues"; "The Wife of Lot Has a Premonition of Her Death"; "Sarah Confronts Abraham Over Hagar"; "Hagar in the Wilderness"; "Outlandish Blues"; "Aretha at Fame Studios".

[Crystal Wilkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of poems! One of the rare talents of American poetry.

[Nate Spears · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection starts with a bang:

Fast Skirt Blues

You Mama's son. You
sister's brother. You
baby's Daddy. You
woman's husband. You,

take me someplace.
Help me burn off a midnight crazy.
The tune in this head as hard

to hold as smoke in my clothes.
Tell me what ails me, baby.
I ain't got no shame--that's
what I say to myself.

I want to teach you the pigmeat
story this evening. I'm an angel
stabbed by the point I dance on.

I need the sanctified blues.
I need the hallelujah nasty.
Take me there.
I don't care where we go.

Jeffers' gather in African American history and voices in this short (50 page) book of poems in which women OWN the blues. She gives voice to the complexities of gender relations and race relations while rarely becoming "political" per se. It's the blues. It just is.

The book is divided into three sections. Although all of the poems could be said to deal with race and gender, those of the first section lean more toward gender and those of the last section lean more toward race. The middle section, which is the longest, gives us the blues of the biblical Sarah, Hagar and Lot's wife. Though Jeffers thanks "the creator" in her dedication, she clearly isn't an uncritical Christian.

Hagar to Sarai

Don't give me nothing in
exchange for a beating
in my belly, sore nipples
way after the sucking is gone.
Don't thank me for my body,
a fine drinking skin
turned inside out for you.
Don't thank me for the back
that don't break from Abram's weight.
I know what you need--a baby's
wail in the morning,
smile on your man's face,
his loins full of much obliged.
I know what you need;
don't give me your grief
to help this thing along.
I know how emptiness feels.
Woman, I know how
to make my own tears.

The palpable anger in the poem keeps that last line from being self-pitying but rather a declaration of selfhood.

Jeffers feels an affinity with the pantoum. There are three or four in this book. I would call them competent, even apt, but not spectacular. Perhaps one day she'll really nail it.

Though I won't seek out more of Jeffers' work, I would certainly grab up any that crossed me path and I'll probably keep this one.

Though this book is beautifully produced by Wesleyan Press, the cover is completely off. It's a picture of black men on a chain gang. This has near to nothing to do with the subject matter of the book, which focuses on women. There's the sense that they just found something historically African American and were finished. Sad. The book deserved a more fitting cover and I have a hard time imagining they couldn't have found something much better.

[LaTrice McNeil-Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Wife of Lot After the Fire had me like 😳🤯🥵. Sis can WRITE!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blues from the Bible on up. Deep and moving verses.