McFarland, JoAnne: American Graphic

Green Linden Press, paperback

Publication Date: December 3, 2024

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Winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for Poetic Innovation

With candor and insight, American Graphic confronts personal and cultural pasts. Juxtaposing historical documents—recipes from the first cookbook published by a Black woman in the States, reward posters for people fleeing enslavement—with intimate moments from the present, the book's magic is to bend time so we see that the past’s rivers flow through us into the future. Spare yet lyrical in its language, American Graphic is a concentrate of feeling and vision.

"In the slaughterhouse of the nation, the history, the language, JoAnne McFarland writes: 'The feather inside me won’t be quiet.' And of the winter: 'It could change in a heartbeat, it will change as our hearts are beating.' American Graphic is a field of marks and feelings quite impossible to describe. Minimalist yet dense, a thicket of sparse reckoning out of which beauty is pulled to the surface with muscle and voice, color and hand. Dynamic and exacting, McFarland’s is a brilliant, singular vision. American Graphic is an astonishing work. —aracelis girmay