All Told

by Hettie Jones

Poetry. African American Studies. "How lucky I am to have my good humor! Without it I might / have been blue instead of delighted enough with my life/ and the two baby house plants I've just brought home / to share with me their destiny, or maybe to combine us/ in that one big destiny"-("All Told"). ALL TOLD adds to the achievement of DRIVE, Hettie Jones's prize-winning first collection. "Her gift is to paint with vivid words and to cloak her wit with images in such a way that they liner in the mind long after the reading"-Midwest Book Review.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Hettie Jones (born 1934 as Hettie Cohen) is best known as the first wife of Amiri Baraka, known as LeRoi Jones at the time of their marriage, but is also a writer herself.

While known for her poetry, she has received acclaim for her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones (published 1990 by Grove Press).

Jones held various clerical jobs at Partisan Review and started the literary magazine Yugen with her husband. Jones is currently on the faculty in the graduate program in creative writing at The New School in New York City. From 1989-2002 she ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills, which included inmate Judy Clark as a student, and which published a nationally distributed collection, Aliens At The Border. Jones is a former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and is currently a member of PEN's Advisory Council.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I said darling, I said
dear. I said baby,
I said daughter
I am leaving

ask your father to tell you why

why we took photos
why we played music

ask your father
why I'm gone


I said darling I said
dear, I said baby,
I said daughter
there will be no life without you

I said baby there
will be no life, but
I have sworn to do no harm
and so I will not stay for death

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hettie Jones is a treasure. Sexy, spritely and spirited, she has a real gift for making the mundane, metaphorically grand. If you haven't read All Told, do so post haste. Straight talk with spritzy sprezzaura!!!

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

“No one warned me that music will outlast / the moment it moves, that death and disappearance / are one”
from “Dinner in the Diner”

Overall not my favorite, but some bright moments.

Sealey Challenge 28/31

[Andrea Janov · Rating 4 out of 5]

New York City is embedded in these poems, in these lines, in these syllables. Hettie's poems are somehow both grounded in the concrete of the city streets yet float in the ether that is poetry.