Winner of the Harper Lee Award (2018)
In her three previous, award-winning collections of blues poetry, Honorée 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.
Table of Content
fear
Singing Counter
Draft of an Ex-Colored Letter Sent Home From the Post-Race War Front
I End the Winter
Apologia for Something
My Father as Walter Lee Younger
Try to Hide
beauty
Mammy Know
Portrait D’une Négresse
Light
blues
Magdalene Brings
Magdalene Begins to See Jesus
What Jesus Said to Magdalene at Their Last Meal
Magdalene’s Wait
Magdalene on the Third Day
hoodoo
Memory of Vision of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans (1996)
Memory of Ancestral Vision (2006)
Angry Black Woman in Root Worker Drag
After, We’ll Read the Bible
Job to His Daughter Jemima
[Faith is a virgin wrist]
[Today you spoke to me]
[Before I came to you]
[And how does God come]
[There is only]
[I recall four words]
[There is some blessedness]
wit
The Glory Gets
Female Surgery
My 4:15pm Shrink’s Appointment on Thursday
Memory of One Day in a Kitchen
Birthright
Patience
If Free, Then
Notes
Gratitude
Publication Acknowledgments and Credits
About the author
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet whose work examines culture, religion, history, and family. She is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book The Age of Phillis was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for poetry. Her previous poetry collections include The Glory Gets, Red Clay Suite, Outlandish Blues and The Gospel of Barbecue. An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, she teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is a professor of English.
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