Vessel

“Our need to tell stories comes from an almost equal need for hard truths, and Parneshia Jones’s gorgeous poetry collection is full of bold lyricism and elegant storytelling. Her poems force us to question our skin politics, our bent up genealogies, our gender binaries, and the ways these artifices stack up to weigh us down. Right now, when it can be so difficult to be heard over all of the alarmingly vocal racism and sexism, we need Jones’s fearless poems to speak for us.”

“In the tradition of Brooks, Hansberry, Danner, and Walker, Parneshia Jones, dutiful daughter and attentive poet-witness of the Black Chicago Renaissance, imagines and serves memory to us out of a teeming black skillet of life. There is something about a black girl born and raised in Chicago, with a pencil behind her ear, that alters the alphabet from finite to infinite. Jones has written a sweet and unforgettable first child.”

“These are poems that feel intimate, yet at the same time this is verse that takes on much that is part of our collective history… . In Vessel, Parneshia Jones, working in distilled, layered language, mines the quotidian, the casual, the seemingly incidental to unearth resonant meaning that matters to us all.”

“Parneshia Jones is pure literary juke—a record’s smoothest rotation, the roll steady of the Gulf. She’s cool Chicago late nights and the slow crawl of Sunday morning in New Orleans. Parneshia is a world of a woman—Renaissance Conjure Priestess of planet earth and the way, way beyond. We want her words filling our shelves, our lungs, our hearts. Eyes forward; hands on the wheel—Parneshia Jones knows every curve of the road, the byway, highway—and we’re always along for the ride.”