[12/01/24] Jackson, Imani Elizabeth: Flag

Futurepoem, paperback

Publication Date: December 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

These poems show us new ways to think, to feel, to be, to see a wave like rolled velvet out at sea. Like water, they remember all the sediment around a word, a history, that sea, a river, and with Jackson's steady guidance, they unearth what can and can't be unearthed. I have read them many times, and I will read them many times again, for Flag unveils a new eco-thinking, a flag I hold dear, a banner of love and care. — Eleni Sikelianos

You might hold native soil in the form of a stone thrown at a border tower, but how do you hold the tidewaters of Black diaspora and vitality? Flag moves with remembering's phase shifts: a flood that's also its watercycle's "intensity of rain," and a river that's sand, mud, and silt at its mouth. In Flag, the recursive bend gets all the precision of language normally reserved for something linear and unrelenting. Not all defiance looks the same. Flag gives me so much hope for poetry. — Kimberly Alidio

"We are and were a Black family," Jackson writes and the dead matter of history hums. In this book of nearly subterranean intensity, I feel the poet hum, and it erodes borders between the poet's mouth and the river's, between forms of matter and states of consciousness. I feel Black life too, in its impossible thickness, and all of this in a beautiful economy of language that seizes without coercion and shapes without chisel. Stark, lush, and streaming, these poems show me how spirit isn't just born, it's made. — Benjamin Krusling