The Gospel of Barbecue - (Wick Poetry First Books (Paperback)) by Jeffers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"Honorée Jeffers is an exciting and original new poet, and The Gospel of Barbecue is her aptly titled debut work. These poems are sweet and sassy, hot and biting, flavored in an exciting blend of precise language and sharp and surprising imagery that delights. They leave a taste in your mouth, these poems; they are true to themselves and to the world. They are gospel, indeed, and this young poet will be heard more and more spreading the true word. Good news!" --Lucille Clifton

Review Quotes

"Honi Jeffers is a storyteller in the Hurston tradition, no small feat in the parlance of voicings. The world she creates is more than speech and brighter than utterance alone. There is a moral center, a fluency of nuance, and a healthy respect for what has been lost, and what shall be gained. Her testimony is alive with culinary vocables: meditative, engaged, fearless and fearsome, with its own elegance, and steeled in an analysis of kin and kinship." --Michael S. Harper

"The Gospel of Barbecue is a fine fire, a brilliance moving with swaying choir robes in a harmony of pain lived to sweetness. In poems that touch the most tender and open parts of the ancestral stream of what it is to be African and woman and southern in this America, Honorée Jeffers delivers song, sermon, and supplication. This is the opening solo of a voice in the widest range, a voice that will light and lead the way. Trajectories, victories are in this spirit moving in chords charted by the losses and loves of our fathers and our mothers--of all the poets, those who sing to live." --Afaa M. Weaver

About the Author