Vessel

Reviews / Votes

Praise for Vessel Midwest Book Award Winner "In the poems of Parneshia Jones, the lines of black history that angled north from the Deep South after the First World War empty into the bruised and tender histories of family and community."--Soujourners "In the tradition of Brooks, Hansberry, Danner, and Walker, Parneshia Jones, dutiful daughter and attentive poet-witness of the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930 - 1950) imagines and serves memory to us out of a teeming black skillet of life. There is something about a black girl born and raised in Chicago, with a pencil behind her ear, that alters the alphabet from finite to infinite. Jones has written a sweet unforgettable first child."--Nikky Finney, author of Head Off & Split "Parneshia Jones is pure literary juke -- a record's smoothest rotation, the roll steady of the Gulf. She's cool Chicago late nights and the slow crawl of Sunday morning in New Orleans. Parneshia is a world of a woman -- Renaissance Conjure Priestess of planet earth and the way way beyond. We want her words filling our shelves, our lungs, our hearts. Eyes forward; hands on the wheel -- Parneshia Jones knows every curve of the road, the byway, highway -- and we're always along for the ride."--Ellen Hagan, author of Hemisphere "Our need to tell stories comes from an almost equal need for hard truths and Parneshia Jones's gorgeous poetry collection, Vessel, is full of bold lyricism and elegant storytelling. Her poems force us to question our skin politics, our bent up genealogies, our gender binaries, and the ways these artifices stack up to weigh us down. Whether the imperative is coming from Mae West, Sylvia Plath, or Jones herself, these poems make clear that 'The screams behind the voice reveal her truth.' Right now, when it can be so difficult to be heard over all of the alarmingly vocal racism and sexism, we need Jones's fearless poems to speak for us."--Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke "From bra shopping to haiku to a tribute to Josephine Baker, Parneshia Jones touches all poetic bases in this pioneering book. Whether the scene is somewhere in Mississippi or in today's Chicago, she gives us a panorama that only a young inspired black woman could create, not sociologically but poetically. That's as rare these days as visionary poetry itself, but Parneshia Jones does it. She puts the music back into language with an energy that sings off the page."--Samuel Hazo, author of Once for the Last Bandit