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aliciaprettybrowneyereader's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
This is the poet’s debut collection and it lays the foundation for her future works. The themes/topics contained in the collection: Black Southern life, American history, family dynamics. She covers these topics with emotional brilliance.
rtwilliams16's review
4.0
This is Jeffers first poetry collection. The poems cover history, colorism in families and Black society at large, race relations, and generational trauma and love. Barbecue lovers will especially enjoy the title poem. Jeffers has a way with words, very descriptive and powerful. Will stay with you after reading it.
Favorite poems: "Ellen Craft", "The Gospel of Barbecue", "Only the Yellow", "To Keep from Shouting Sometime", "Bless All the Givers of Pain", "Big Mama Thornton", "The Light Brigade", "Missing Tolstoy", "Philly in the Light".
Favorite poems: "Ellen Craft", "The Gospel of Barbecue", "Only the Yellow", "To Keep from Shouting Sometime", "Bless All the Givers of Pain", "Big Mama Thornton", "The Light Brigade", "Missing Tolstoy", "Philly in the Light".
jerseyfemme's review
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
I mean sheesh! Amazing! Delicious writing! This lady right here is a gift! I'm obsessed with her writing and her different styles in the poems. So many favorites. So many emotions! I can't wait to dive into the rest of her works as I read them in publication order! Loved!
freechasetoday's review
In her blurb for this book, Lucille Clifton says: “They leave a taste in your mouth, these poems; they are true to themselves and to the world.” Poetry that is sharp and personal and wide-ranging, deeply in conversation with art and text and tradition and praxis.
xterminal's review
1.0
Honoree Fannone Jeffers, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University Press, 2000)
I knew that eventually my honeymoon with the Wick poetry series would come to an end. I just didn't think it would come crashing down quite this badly. There are two types of poetry that a writer can indulge in that will generally lead to awful output, poetry-as-message and poetry-as-therapy. Honoree Fannone Jeffers steeps herself in both throughout the entire length of The Gospel of Barbecue, the winner of the 1999 Wick poetry prize, and as bad a book of poetry as I have so far come across this year.
There is not a word to be found in this volume that is not pregnant with message. That's true of most poetry books, of course, but Jeffers has yet to understand the value of subtext, and thus the poems in this book contain no subtlety, no ambiguousness, no startling imagery that's not directly related to the message the author is trying to get across; in short, nothing that makes a poem poetic other than the usual chopping up of sociopolitical screed into little lines to make it look poetic.
“There were four of them:/The fat one who looked at my dark/mother, her English professor,/as if Mama had no right to be living./The one whose room/smelled of cooked hair grease./The one with the rich parents/who sent her ten dollars every year./The one with no parents./They reminded me of the strange/soup I read about once in a children's book./The little-bit-of-everything soup./Carrots, cabbage, meat, and stones./A trickery stew.” (“The Light Brigade”)
That's the subtle part of the poem. The hammer gets bigger and harder after that.
Someone wiser than I-- I forget who, now-- once said that if you can take a poem, take out the line breaks, and read it exactly the same when it's prose, then what you have in front of you isn't a poem. In this case, I think the work speaks for itself. *
I knew that eventually my honeymoon with the Wick poetry series would come to an end. I just didn't think it would come crashing down quite this badly. There are two types of poetry that a writer can indulge in that will generally lead to awful output, poetry-as-message and poetry-as-therapy. Honoree Fannone Jeffers steeps herself in both throughout the entire length of The Gospel of Barbecue, the winner of the 1999 Wick poetry prize, and as bad a book of poetry as I have so far come across this year.
There is not a word to be found in this volume that is not pregnant with message. That's true of most poetry books, of course, but Jeffers has yet to understand the value of subtext, and thus the poems in this book contain no subtlety, no ambiguousness, no startling imagery that's not directly related to the message the author is trying to get across; in short, nothing that makes a poem poetic other than the usual chopping up of sociopolitical screed into little lines to make it look poetic.
“There were four of them:/The fat one who looked at my dark/mother, her English professor,/as if Mama had no right to be living./The one whose room/smelled of cooked hair grease./The one with the rich parents/who sent her ten dollars every year./The one with no parents./They reminded me of the strange/soup I read about once in a children's book./The little-bit-of-everything soup./Carrots, cabbage, meat, and stones./A trickery stew.” (“The Light Brigade”)
That's the subtle part of the poem. The hammer gets bigger and harder after that.
Someone wiser than I-- I forget who, now-- once said that if you can take a poem, take out the line breaks, and read it exactly the same when it's prose, then what you have in front of you isn't a poem. In this case, I think the work speaks for itself. *
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