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.
 

“Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah,” reads the first line of Jessica Jacobs' unalone. By the end of this opening poem, however, Jacobs has defined her engagement with religious texts as an act of devotion to living fully in the world’s complexity: “Here, love, is fruit with the sun still inside it. Let me // thumb the juice from your chin. Let us honor what we love / by taking it in.” Structured around the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, the trajectory of unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world. Whether conversing with the sacred texts she reads or writing from her subjects' perspectives, Jacobs navigates an abundance of experiences: growing up queer, embracing one's sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, wrestling with religious history and the imposed roles of womanhood, exploring how the past foreshadows our current climate crisis, and revisiting the blush of new love while cataloging the profound, though more familiar, joys of a long relationship. 


Deeply personal and yet universal in its truths, unalone draws on the Book of Genesis as a living document whose stories, wisdom, and ethical knots can engage us more fully with our own lives — whatever your religious tradition or spiritual beliefs. In this stunning and ambitious book, Jacobs reminds us that all poetry serves as a kind of prayer – a recognition of beauty, a spoken bid for connection, a yearning toward an understanding that might better guide us through our days. When you “dive / from the twin heights of your eyes,” “that tiny pool below” isn’t God. “Well, not exactly,” Jacobs comforts us. “It’s you. One breath deeper than you’ve / ever been, one breath closer to the heeded, heedful world.”