Muscadine

by A. H. Jerriod Avant

A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine , cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin [that] teeth / pierce breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty — appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette. In all seasons, the tongue’s subversive intelligence sculpts this masterwork of love, grace, conflict, and grief. This book tastes summer and the “ruins of / an afternoon” at once; it explores the language that testifies to loss while illuminating the abundance that loss obscures. Avant accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past. Don’t forget, he tells us. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger.” See how the weather changes swiftly and “Look / how pops left before we // thought he was done.” But notice, too, how an echo sounds “Listen, / how the voice of a dead man // can live.” He commands us to take the brief blooms with us, says, “Pack me a bag / I can fit in my heart.”

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2023

Reviews

[Emily]

"I am drowned by the leftovers of
myself on these streets"
--The Haunting

[Oliver Egger · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thesis advisor at Wesleyan just came out with his first book today and wow is it good!

The poems in Muscadine are filled with all the simultaneous beauty and tragedy at the heart of loss. Memory, and that long-lost but ever-present “home”, floods the pages of this poetry. Suffering yes, fear, yes, haunting, of course, but also there is JOY in these pages. Joy in the poetry’s utterly original language, a language that is lyrical, that is his family’s, that is his own.

Avant is a MASTER in avoiding the simple story. Nothing is cloying or moralistic—each piece is emotional and well-crafted. This work, like all truly remarkable poetry, refuses to trivialize truth.

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muscadine, A.H. Jerriod Avant's premier collection, is a book I've been waiting for since I read his poem "Missing Person," an elegy for his father, in the Boston Review.

".... It’s been 6 years but I say it hasn’t happened.

Though the day persists, he’s still tucked into a cloud tucked into
a tree in the back of a long black car and my throat won’t

let my heart through no matter how flat my epiglottis falls."

Avant's book is a feast of language including Black vernacular speech that sings with jazz and his writing is a full frontal hit for justice. The ekphrastic poem "Judith and Holofernes," after the painting by Kehinde Wiley, which is after Artemisia Gentileschi’s 17th-century painting of the same name, is a masterpiece addressing the tyranny of race issues in our present day United States. Judith cuts off Holofernes head.

It opens:
"in the frame stood all that could be done.
a dash of blood on a long and ready blade.
a justice this particular day made late."

And the poem ends with questions:
"who’s the poor tyrant in our own Bethulia?
who’s lured us into this hunting, spooked
us into such a calamitous marriage?"

[Bethulia was the city under siege that Judith rescued with her seduction and action.]

Through out Avant's book we find seven poems in the palindrome form. Each filled with blues. To hear him read three of these, to feel the power of his voice, go to his page on Obsidian: Literature & Art in the African Diaspora https://obsidianlit.org/project/a-h-jerriod-avant/.

Southern. Family. Soul. Blues. Earth. Heart. A work of magnitude.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Standouts: Pride, Catching, Missing Person, Mistaken Identity of Some Verbs.

Personally didn’t care for the mirrored bluesey poems.

[bug · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome poems. they flow like a narrative sometimes, and sometimes they're more about the rhythm.

[Ben Tabor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it boyos, and read it aloud. Doesn’t do to be quiet with these.

[January O'Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have the opportunity to hear Jerriod read live, you're in for a treat. This is a beautiful book. The rhythm in these poems carries the book.