House Repairs

by Angela Jackson-Brown

"I have often said that good poetry makes you think or feel deeply; great poetry makes you do both. And great poetry is not found in lofty ideals like Truth, Nature, God, or Love. It happens where life happens, down in the midst of things, in the spaces between our hearts. Angela Jackson-Brown's House Repairs, is great poetry. In it you will find what makes poetry necessary. You will find honesty and pain, beauty and atonement in these poems, where the power of strangled and realized possibility sings..."
- Robert Gray
Author of Drew: Poems from Blue Water & Jesus Walks the Southland

"Angela Jackson-Brown offers herself... no, she announces herself to us as Spirit-Woman, and we would do well to heed the histories of hurts and healings woven beautifully and brutally through her poetry. She eviscerates in one three line poem only to coax us back and salve us with long, loving wordstrokes in the next..."
- Colleen S. Harris
Author of The Kentucky Vein, These Terrible Sacraments & God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems

"Early on in this debut collection, Angela Jackson-Brown admits she's writing from her own life, but that isn't exactly true. Instead, I would say she's redefined it - redefining what it is to be black, what it is to be a woman with her real woman's body, and most of all, what it is to survive in a world that did not always want her and in which she did not always even want her own self..." - Nickole Brown
Author of Sister and Fannie Says: A Biography-in-Poems

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

Published August 3, 2018

About the author

Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who teaches Creative Writing at Indiana University in Bloomington. She also teaches in the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Spalding Naslund-Mann low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing. She is the author of several novels, including the soon-to-be released, Homeward, and has published in numerous literary journals. Her publisher is Harper Muse, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Reviews

[Rosemary Royston · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review of House Repairs can be found here:https://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/...

[Luke Hillier · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't have a ton to say here. It was an enjoyable enough read but at least for me seemed to miss the mark at times. I think Jackson-Brown is saying important and meaningful things here about identity, her own unique experiences, and the ways they connect her to those of many Black women. However, I personally was a bit underwhelmed with the relatively straightforward writing style and language throughout. That's not at all to underplay their significance or importance; I was just left wanting more. The poems surrounding her complicated relationship(s?) with her mother figure(s?) were some of the standouts to me, content-wise, so I really appreciated "When a Mother Leaves a Child" and "Mommy Issues: A Poem of Dismissal." I think that the use of metaphor comparing herself to a house in various stages of de/reconstruction was interesting but not deeply integrated into the writing itself. I'm also often a sucker for interweaving Biblical imagery, but again it felt more like straightforward references than anything deeper here. The only poem where that didn't feel like the case to me was "Dry Bones," which was my favorite of the collection, and "Yearning for a Savior" to a lesser extent. I also enjoyed "Sorry," "We Cut," and the titular poem at the end as well.