House Repairs

I have often said that good poetry makes you think or feel deeply; great poetry makes you do both. And great poetry is not found in lofty ideals like Truth, Nature, God, or Love. It happens where life happens, down in the midst of things, in the spaces between our hearts. Angela Jackson-Brown’s House Repairs, is great poetry. In it you will find what makes poetry necessary. You will find honesty and pain, beauty and atonement in these poems, where the power of strangled and realized possibility sings…

• Robert Gray

Author of Drew: Poems from Blue Water & Jesus Walks the Southland
Angela Jackson-Brown offers herself… no, she announces herself to us as Spirit-Woman, and we would do well to heed the histories of hurts and healings woven beautifully and brutally through her poetry. She eviscerates in one three line poem only to coax us back and salve us with long, loving wordstrokes in the next…

• Colleen S. Harris
  Author of The Kentucky Vein, These Terrible Sacraments & God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems

Early on in this debut collection, Angela Jackson-Brown admits she’s writing from her own life, but that isn’t exactly true. Instead, I would say she’s redefined it - redefining what it is to be black, what it is to be a woman with her real woman’s body, and most of all, what it is to survive in a world that did not always want her and in which she did not always even want her own self… - Nickole Brown
Author of Sister and Fannie Says: A Biography-in-Poems