Released in January 2023, Halifax, Canada
Twisted feelings unfold into words.
A continuum of poetic thoughts…
of inherited nature, family and life…
well-intentioned dysfunctional interiors…
HEIRLOOMS: A Time to Downsize
Released in 2022, Halifax, Canada
How we form and preserve our traditions is found in our ‘stuff.’
Mama taught me to crochet and sew in the summer of ‘63. On our old working Singer I made dresses from scratch, no need for a pattern. I finally gave the machine to a new mother needing to mend and create for her infant and toddler. I wept for days.
Did I miss the machine or the memories connected to it? Memory boxes were as popular as origami jewelry to assemble. In one lesson at the San Francisco Public library, one rainy night during the monsoon season of 2017, I learned to craft birds. Gifts that year were small paper sculptures and earrings with gold plated hooks. I could make, or mend just about anything. What to do with these fragile collectibles now?
Many given gifts, purchased, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved or of lost origins. Like a fixative, or human elixir, mementos brought a calming effect. Inside and outside my home items set things right. A balance. Magical memories are contained in why and how the gift was given.
Jeri released A NECESSARY FAMILY – Cosmo Gumbo on July 24 in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Fifty metatonaec years after the tragic extinction of planet Eaerthdon, life on planet Tenson is in turmoil. Charged by Chief Elder Amos to eliminate bigotry, four Zumanaur teen ghosts, Ava, Manon, Mereminum, and Feifer, exit Cosmo Gumbo on their mission to Louisgrove. With precious time to spare, they rush to join their necessary families and confront the injustices that lie ahead.
Stunned by the sudden sight and sound of corona Chaz, the ghosts brace themselves as the mad, beastly, saber-toothed golden tiger digs hard into the ground, kicking up dust, clawing the air. With blood marks trailing down his spattered face, Feifer plunges his weapon into the cinnamon-striped beast as it crashes down the windswept alps to its demise.
The ghosts continue their journey, traveling down the lowlands, hoping their presence will make a difference.
SKIN FOLK
Released in July 2021, Pennsylvania
Stunned by resemblance,
splash of freckles unites us:
kindred connection.
A Jazz Artist Sings Her History through Poetry
“Skin Folk,” poetry by jazz artist and former professor at Concordia University, Canada, Jeri Brown, is a collection fueled by the past. It is meant as a prism by which to read what comes before. The poems weave together to form an ethnographical and lyrical tapestry in essay, photo, poem and photograph form.
“Skin Folk” is an ode to character, to archetype, specifically, to women, to the working-class, to strength as well as to vulnerability. Brown opens with the poem, “warrior” and the line, “What do disabled warriors do?” There is pride here for those who have come first to lay down roots. Here, and elsewhere, enjambment works as a political act, a subtle and significant class awareness that colors the entirety of the book.
It is this overlay that is the triumph of the book, Brown’s squarely placing her speaker in the position of context, of inheritance, of the tradition of migrations (we travel from the American South to Norway and finally to Quebec).
In “Skin Folk,” though, Brown and her speaker understand and embrace the present of understanding by traveling, figuratively and literally, over various physical, musical and ancestral landscapes. There is a sacredness in this that energizes and ignites. “Skin Folk” goes within the skin, to deferentially pursue the convergence of place and person, the complexity of self by what has led to self.—Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, author of Images for Radical Politics.
THEY WON’T BELIEVE YOU AND OTHER STORIES
Released in 2020, Halifax, Canada
Released in 2020, Halifax, Canada
If you tell they won’t believe you.
I’ll come for you,
your mama and little Zee.
In a novel about the life of a domestically troubled eleven-year-old, Dolena encounters violence head-on in fantasy town Missaki on Christmas Eve. It describes an emotional relationship between stepfather and stepdaughter that fuels childhood trauma. Dolena observes and confronts domestic abuse in her household, ending with physical acts against her.
In a mental health review of the imprisoned career predator, under direction of psychiatrist Myrtle Miller, at his fourth and final parole hearing, the life of a career criminal is exposed.