Linda Susan Jackson is the author of two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty. Most recently her work has appeared in Gathering Ground, Los Angeles Review, Rivendell, Warpland, Brooklyn Review, andBrilliant Corners among other publications. Her awards include a fellowship to Cave Canem. She is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Medgar Evers College/CUNY and lives in Brooklyn.
It’s the violins that wake me, not the smell of fried apples, sunnyside eggs or percolating coffee hissing as it spills over on the stove, not the dream of eating left over fried chicken for breakfast. It’s those violins that open the song the way the sun opens the day, removing the darkness from last […]
-for my father After the first eight weeks of basic at Fort Dix, the second eight at Fort Bliss and six months of country western blaring from mounted speakers in Kaiserslautern, I needed more than another weekend in Vogelweh barracks. A Friday morning in ’56, I’d heard Mulligan was set to gig on Ramstein Air […]
She had it trained on him for two hundred years or more, give or take a day. She watched him stockpile women unloaded from the cargo holds of ships that ferried them so far from their homes. He dressed them in linen and lace, grew fat on the interest he earned dealing their flesh. Roués […]
She spins in the sky with gritty guys. Before long, she’s tapped off, her underside, slack. Why, that last rogue even stole two cone-shaped jars full of coins their mother left. He disappeared into the low country, certain he could hide out in tall grass. This lapse leveled her good eye, dulled her delight for […]
Elvin’s mallets, their meaty heads the color of rotten cotton, assault taut hollow skin, tense flesh melts like sweetmeat in the cruel steady boom of a Birmingham morning. Tyner’s piano keens a torrent of chords matching the drum’s steady blast, staccato plunge into the slicing odor and sting of sulfur cutting through the luminous Birmingham […]
Linda Susan Jackson, author of the chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty, talks about the genesis of her poetry including her poem, At Last.
Linda Susan Jackson, author of the chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty, talks about the genesis and form of her poem, September 15, 1963.