[06/30/26] Joiner, Fred L.: The Mirror in Our Music

Birds, LLC, paperback

Publication Date: June 30, 2026

Publisher Marketing: The Mirror in Our Music is a nearly 200-page, full-color do-si-do document chronicling Fred L. Joiner's decades of community building and collaboration with countless poets, musicians, artists, photographers, and ancestors.

"When considering Fred Joiner’s nimble reflections and sharply observed personal and political nuances, ruminations of which make up a kind of aesthetic/esthetic inner life, I am reminded of the ten-year span of letters between Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray in Trading Twelves, in which they riff and wax poetic on life, literature, travel, family, philosophy, politics, art, aesthetics, music, racism, identity, and such, in a sense a running dialogue reminiscent of the exchange between two jazz musicians in a jam session, improvising twelve bars of music around the same musical idea—trading twelves. In this regard, what Joiner manages in The Mirror in Our Music is a triad: an exchange between the Poem and the Music and Art. Joiner could’ve put out a collection of poetry decades ago. But he was 'woodshedding,' as he likes to say. He was in fact honing his skills because he has that much respect for poetry—and the music! This is sacred ground to him. Holy water and altar. It is about revering ancestors and the power of the word and a higher being. And thus, here we are." — Tony Medina

The scrapbook, like the quilt, like a horn section--like a life, a way of shaping part of our humanness into something you can put in your hands or inside you—a boat to carry our humanness—a boat of our crafting. And finally, love pushes the boat across. Fred L. Joiner has been scraping, scoring, and shouldering the history of Black art and aesthetics in poems that span Duke, the blues, Ella Fitzgerald, family, the aging body, and poems in response to work by Ewané Nja Kwa and Deborah Will’s. These tight meditative poems come from an explorer, collector of Blackness, and its many beings. The poems are quiet but loud in their thinking and expansiveness; they want us to understand the riches of what has been found. I like how the poems are not just simply showing but letting what has been found into the speaker’s body, touching one’s heart, mind, and mouth. —Tyree Daye

The Mirror in Our Music is a monumental representative journey punctuated by Fred Joiner's global and intimate scope of music sketched on the mystical, mythical landscape of Southern and urban aesthetics. The poet inhabits many haunting voices with an agility that evokes and sustains clarity and rituals for the fellowship of the sound. This collection harnesses an elegant aesthetic for the power of the gaze inside collective wounds; specific and sometimes unadorned. Vivid poetic intelligence delivers a long-awaited requiem for sorrow, joy, transcendence, and the timelessness of Black consciousness. —Jaki Shelton Green

Fred Joiner writes in medley, combining registers of language that are tender while mournful, wise and rebellious, yearning yet faithful, "blade and balm." Fervently dialogic and fiercely devotional, Joiner's The Mirror in our Music is a conjuring of chorus through ecstatic ekphrasis. Summoning Malachi Thompson, Thelonius Monk, Lucille Clifton, Ella Fitzgerald, grandfathers, uncles, and more, this collection is an intensive study in Black language and sound as polyphonic communion. —Destiny Hemphill