Nine Books About Your Life:

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their life. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with Alexis V. Jackson, author of My Sisters’ Country (Kore Press).

First Book
The first book I remember reading is The Monster at the End of This Book. My mom used to read it with me before bed when I was a child. I know it stands out to me because the book relies on its reader continuing to turn the page after Grover warns the reader time and time again not to press on. Of course, the nature of the text is one that requires and compels the reader to turn to the end, so it was a kind of exercise in trusting the text/medium more than the narrator. I also remember this text because one night I told my mother not to turn the page, and she abruptly closed the book and said it was time for bed. Her response was unexpected, and I instantly regretted suggesting we listen to Grover for once. I think I just wanted to see what she would do–to see what would happen if we both agreed to listen to the narrator and end the book, to which we both knew the ending prematurely.

Most Cherished Book
My most cherished book is my mother’s college copy of Toni Cade Bambara’s “Salvation is the Issue.” Mostly because her younger self’s notes are there. I feel like I’m reading my mother’s initial discovery and thoughts surrounding her experience of Bambara and the text while myself being transformed by both. It’s a reminder that I’m not ever alone when I read–that there’s always someone’s voice there with me (another reader and the author’s and the author’s influences), a reminder that these words shaped my experience of my mother and my mother’s experiences. A reminder of the fullness of the definition of “text.” It feels holy and of great historical importance.

Most Perplexing Book
Of course, for me, here it must be the Bible. I understand it, and then I don’t. I knew parts of it before I could read it. Held it before I could read it. Was gifted it before I could walk. Had my life shaped by it before I was, and yet the God of the Scriptures as I experience Them, is not the same God I was given. And this God is not the same Divine Being/Spirit that those who read the same text believe to be real. It’s the first text that was an exercise in reception theory because I was taught there was a right and wrong way to interpret and read it, even store it, and yet life taught me there were so many ways that felt unwrong and so many that felt untrue. As a holy text and as someone who believes in a divine creator, the text’s existence as it is (in all its various ways of being read, interpreted, etc.) baffles, and at times, saddens me. It’s brought both joy and violence as a textual tool. I don’t fully understand why it would be written or allowed to be written in a way that would allow both.

Life-changing Book
A life-changing book was Langston Hughes’ collected. I think it was the first time I saw an entire, thick book of poems by a Black person. I think it was the first time I fathomed that a Black person could make poems about various subjects, including the lives of Black folk, their life’s work. I remember my mother buying it for a school project (4th grade I think), and I just flipped through and read random poems because I wanted to see what they were like, if they were all the same, how they were different, why they were important. What changed me, was the work. I memorized “I too Sing America,” but also read “The Weary Blues,” and saw in text the quotes I’d heard in church and amongst phone conversations and during award ceremonies “Life ain’t been no crystal stair,” and I saw more. I saw that folk don’t memorize it all, but it doesn’t mean it’s not important enough to be in a book, important enough to write down, important enough to matter.

Most Underrated Book
Major Jackson’s Leaving Saturn and bell hooks’s Bone Black. Bone Black was an important book for me because it taught me my girlhood mattered in a way I hadn’t seen before. I read it in college, and much of my first book is impacted by the way it’s written–short, essay reflections on rich experiences of what makes us Black girls and Black women. It felt complete as a mirror that didn’t need an arc. I must admit that its impact on me personally does not mean it’s done the same for others, but I think it deserves more hype. And Major Jackson’s Leaving Saturn because he did what my fresh princess sonnets do before I thought to write them, and because he writes about Black Philly boyhood in a way that I’ve never read or encountered before or since–it’s mundanity and otherworldliness handled with the formal and informal care of language and verse. He let me know I could write about my city in a way that reflected love and the realness of what seemed like incongruent language (the studied poet and the Philly jawn). That I could write about me and my city and my city’s people and my people’s literary history and poetic history with so much love, even where there was sometimes pain. The book is award-winning, but I don’t hear enough folk talking about it.

A Surprising Book
I think people are always surprised to hear how much I love Enter Whining by Fran Drescher. Honestly, I think it’s an extremely well-written memoir, and I’m sure majority of the strength of my defense for this book comes from my surprising love of and for Fran Drescher. I’ve seen every episode of The Nanny four times, and some of my first angsty teen short stories were indeed fan fiction for The Nanny. Ha-ha. I can laugh about it now, but I thought I was going to write for TV one day. Regardless, this was also one of the first contemporary memoirs I’d read, and the truth that one could artfully write about one’s life intrigued me. I haven’t read it in a long time; so, I cannot sharply defend it as much as I could then. However, I stand by the beauty of this funny, frightening, and beautiful memoir. Sorry, not sorry.

Your Most Recent Book
My first poetry book is just this. What motivated it was everything. 1) I had a lot to say about poetry and Black poetry and the church and the Bible and God and sex and me and sadness and happiness and love and unloveliness and fairness 2) I wanted to write all the important poems and put them all in a book. 3) I wanted to elevate the words of Black women to that of the divine. I wanted them to be seen as the necessary scriptural text they were and are for my life and for many others.

The experience of writing it was intense. I wrote most of it during my MFA program and was intensely focused on getting something cohesive, whole, loving, and true out into the world. Something that let other folk like me know we weren’t alone and that we were possible. That we continued to need one another and that this text existed as a place where they could find, name, and call me country.

What I want folk to get from it is the latter, that there are so many folk like me who need to find, name, and call Black women country, that the places where the language feels foreign to them are places where the language feels familiar and necessary to many. That Black women, once considered countryless property, are continuing to use Elanor W. Traylor’s “Black womanword” to make sense of and peace with the complexity of being. That this making requires the questioning of and breaking and remaking language. That this making is necessary and beautiful.

Your Next Book
The next book is about Black woman saints. Inspired by Ai and Clifton and Teyhimba Jess and the Black Madonna and Ifá and my own great auntie, who was rumored to have been denied nunhood due to the color of her skin, I wanted to write a book that wondered after the lives of these Black women “saints.” A book of poems that considers what it means to be a “saint,” and pays homage to the Black women who fit these guidelines. There will be some personae, but also some odes and some folk songs and hymns.  It requires so much research, but it feels necessary; so, I must write it.

Plug a Book
This is so difficult because so many folk I know have books out! Farah Jasmine Griffin Read Until You Understand because she’s amazing, the book is beautiful, and because Philly. Carly Ingrahm’s The Animal Indoors because Carly’s work always asks the reader to identify themself a “human” or a “thing” in a culture that continues to purposefully blur the lines, and this book does the same.