In our violence, in our need, in our appetite for every last thing, we are no different than even the most terrifying gods. What might heal us or make us whole? The truth, told tenderly or with bared teeth—which is what Linda Susan Jackson delivers in poem after astonishing poem. Truth Be Told is in every way a Revelation.
—Tracy K. Smith
When Toni Morrison, in her Nobel Laureate Lecture, offers the writerly imperative to, “tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light,” Linda Susan Jackson heard her clearly. In Truth Be Told, Jackson explores womanhood with the precision of Morrison by extending the lives of the characters from The Bluest Eye, allowing them to speak to our present moment. There’s the wisdom of Morrison; the wisdom of Jackson; and the wisdom of young Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist of the novel, but there’s more: there’s also the lyric intensity, the music of the taut line, coupled with the sagacity, which is really all Jackson at the top of her game. And this would be plenty, but, yes, there’s even more. Jackson manages
to hit us with her uses of enchantment not only by reviving the sisterhood of Persephone but also of the women—mothers, sisters, daughters, and lovers—in the world around us. This collection reads like a novel that is part bildungsroman, part roman á clef, and forms, as a whole, the interior life of many real and imagined people, who are dealing both with love and with loss, all of which makes up a life. All I can say is that if you don’t laugh a little, if your eyes don’t well up in tears a little, if you don’t learn anything between these pages, I’ll have to “summon an ancient refrain”: “With the blues—no need to explain.”
—A. Van Jordan
Linda Susan Jackson’s Truth Be Told conjures these poems to bloom between the breaths of Toni Morrison’s text and ancient mythology. She sings us a drylongso meditation on Black womanhood in the cauldron of America’s blue-eyed blues. From this Truth, we learn how to navigate the space between fiction and myth on the perilous boat of poetry till we land winded and whole on homeland’s shore the way “A bird in the night / flies her song through the darkness— / tremolo in blues.”
—Tyehimba Jess