Ashley M. Jones (Reparations Now!) is both the youngest person and the first person of color to serve as the poet laureate of Alabama, and Lullaby for the Grieving makes abundantly evident the talent that elevated her to that position. Though a thick line of grief threads through the collection, the poems are full of life and punctuated with joy and possibility. In the full-justified prose poem "I feel powerful when," the speaker celebrates her hair, her voice, her "legs are shined up in the way Black legs shine, soaking up light, space, time, your attention and wonder."
The death of the poet's father grounds the collection, especially through the "Grief Interlude" poems interspersed throughout, each varied in style and tone but combining to provide an image of the man she describes in "Snow Poem" as "the fence to hold things out and keep us in." There is defiant anger, too, as in "Watcher Woman, or, Upon Seeing A Grown White Man Look A Black Girl Up and Down As She Passed By on a Birmingham Street," a golden shovel of Lucille Clifton's "What the Mirror Said," and in "Conflict/War," which asks: "Remember discovery and the murders necessary for making a whole new/ world? Remember Oklahoma. Remember Alabama." Despite this heaviness, the collection feels buoyant, luminous, bold. It is an incomparably fine meal, each poem to be savored, each so good as to make readers doubt the next poem could measure up. But it does. It always does. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian