Magic City Gospel

All of these poems are quite good and some are truly excellent. Much of her language treats homestyle southern foods as the basis for description which I find characterizing and clever. I would say perhaps that is the most common element in here: collards and cornbread.But what I find to be the apogee of her writing is when Ashley Jones is regarding what it's like to be black today. What it's like to be a black woman today. What the world does with black culture today. Poems like 'Rammer Jammer' about the uneasiness of George Wallace in the face of protesters, poems like 'The first time I heard about slavery' about the young girl feeling she's all alone in the world after learning slavery was a fact of history and a blurrier contemporary fact. Poems like 'Virgin Mary, Reimagined' as her grandmothers, her aunts, herself. When the author engages in politics, politics under the definition of the assumptions or principles concerned with power and status in a society, she is her most striking, humorous, and sharp self.

Fantastic collection of poems. Here are some examples of the poet's superlative titles: "The First Time I Heard About Slavery," "Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute," and "How to Make Your Daughters Culturally Aware and Racially Content During Christmastime." Jones writes "Elegy," after Amiri Baraka ("You were not our flower, / Baraka, / but our fertilizer") and I'd say this book is also for fans of Lucille Clifton, Pat Parker and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Great poems. Combination of music and history.

Excellent poetry with a personal touch. Reading transfers you into the mind of the poet and you are struck with a sense of being transported into her experience.

I needed this book for a class also. I liked it!.

Wow this book is beautiful. All of it, everylittlebit. Like how the first poem is about Sam Cooke & fear. I esp. love the endings of these poems. "your accent heavy as oil, it sounds like a proverb—clean tomato, sovereign God." Poems about Alabama (which I love bc my fam is from Alabama) & blackness & black women & black boys & God & food & the South. Oh how I love poetry and this book was a perfect and gorgeous reminder of why & why & why.