A stunning sophomore release, Linda Susan Jackson’s newest poetry collection, Truth be Told, looks at the myriad treasures and complexities of Black womanhood by channeling an eclectic cast whose rich interactions testify to the timeless neglect of girlhood, the bond of long-term friendship and the responsibilities of authorship.  Here Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist from The Bluest Eye, addresses herself directly to Toni Morrison and connects, over time and space, with Persephone, a girl herself, cycling always toward the seasons, caught between an overbearing mother, an incomprehensible father and a grooming god; Lot’s wife sets the record straight about turning back; and our speaker writes to and through her lineage, memorializing her great-grandmother’s distilled wisdom and others who have impacted her, such as when she writes to the great blues singer, Etta James.  In a meticulous inventory of our world and its historical inheritance, Jackson makes an undaunted cartographer, mapping “here: rag-wicked IED” to “there: t-shaped IUD,” from “here: the mother I longed for” to “ there: the mother I had.”  If Jackson recognizes the distance between our ideals and our reality as a kind of tragedy, she also resists despair, enjoining us to close the gap with hope for the future and to: “Step here: light the fire/ Step there: fire the cannon.” Every poem is a spark struck, a cannonade hailing the resilient and enigmatic joy of language.  “After decades with no history,” Jackson sagely celebrates, “That I sing at all is a mystery.” A mystery, yes, but moreover — a blessing for those of us enthralled by her song of love.
 

Linda Susan Jackson is the author of What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press), a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Paterson Prize and two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty, both published by Black-eyed Susan Publishing. She has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Calabash International Literary Festival, Soul Mountain Writers Retreat and The Frost Place. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, Center for Book Arts Broadside Publications, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review, Heliotrope, Los Angeles Review, Mission at Tenth Inter-arts Journal, Obsidian: Literature of the African Diaspora, Ploughshares, and Rivendell, among others, and has been featured on The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, and From the Fishouse. She’s a retired associate professor of English from Medgar Evers College/CUNY.