Libre
A soaring collection of poems that deftly explores the familial, personal, and societal relationships of a young Black woman trying to make her way in a fraught world.
Freedom reverberates in Skye Jackson’s breathtaking debut, Libre, with evocative poems that are heart-wrenching, haunting, sensual, and tender. This collection explores the experiences of a young Black woman in New Orleans as she navigates the pull of familial and romantic relationships, celebrating the joys of Blackness, art, and friendship. Libre also includes Jackson’s award-winning poem “can we touch your hair?” which was hand selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project.
An acolyte of Sade and Stevie Nicks, Jackson muses on microaggressions, interracial relationships, and the endless intricacies of Black women’s hair as she rails against loss, random violence, and the dark expectations that society often places upon people of color. She roams each room of the heart, open and unafraid of what she might find behind every door. Through it all, this debut shines as the poetry refracts and reflects like a mirror leaving nothing unseen.
Praise for Libre
"A Skye Jackson poem begins in a small attention, a tender detail, and then guts you suddenly, gently and relentlessly, as it beckons you closer. If Gwendolyn Brooks' syllabic finesse met Toi Derricotte's impeccable enjambment on a sidewalk where Nikki Giovanni's sharp sonic turns were sipping from Audre Lorde's thunder and then all of them climbed on the motorcycle of Wanda Coleman's linguistic frisk, you might get close to what Jackson does in this collection."
- Alina Stefanescu, Dor & Ribald
"Urgent and honest, Skye Jackson’s debut collection, libre, draws us into the delicate space where tenderness and terror coincide in love, in grief, and in one Black woman’s daily accounting of what (or who) is safe or unsafe. As the poems in libre recount a life littered with the violences of “pale hands / from all directions,” Jackson reclaims and rewrites every moment of racist or misogynist erasure into a beautiful, moving appeal to be seen and to be loved."
– Eugenia Leigh, Bianca & Blood Sparrows and Sparrows
"I want to say that Skye Jackson’s Libre is as meditative as it is playful, as delightfully lyric as it is rife with narrative details that make clear a singular experience: “ice cream sam picks me up / down on burgundy; / it’s the Wednesday/before Christmas/when i climb into his truck.” But that way of speaking about this book does it a disservice since it is all those things and more because it stands firmly in a genre of literature that remains all-encompassing in its emotional breadth. Let’s call that genre New Orleans. This is a book about what it means to live fully in a city that is its own mystery, about surviving there and thriving there!"
– Jericho Brown, Pulitzer-Prize winner for The Tradition
“Skye Jackson is one of my favorite poets from New Orleans. Her poems make the confided voice a poetic mode, closed conversations made open. Her poems are often "sore & haunted" while reckoning (painfully and romantically) with the colour and colourism of the South.”
– Raymond Antrobus, Author of Signs, Music & The Perseverance
"With Libre, Skye Jackson gifts us with a complicated, intimate and searingly honest love letter to New Orleans, to family, and to the embodied tenderness of black feminine being within—and crucially: despite—America. These poems are sung conversationally, with a generosity of voice that wraps the reader in both their warmth and horror, as in Jackson’s elegy for Kori Gauthier: “i was like you once. saw the river as comfort, a dark crib, to nurse my suffering. the water, stygian & full of possibilities, delicious silence.” Their casual whimsy often belies a delicious, bitter eye for irony, but also veers so frequently, so precipitously, towards a novel re-articulation of the interior terror that microaggressions so often inflict upon our blackness."
- Tawanda Mulalu, Nearness & Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems
"The defenseless are still defenseless / no matter where you go," writes Skye Jackson in her raw, musical, and imagistically rich, Libre. In this collection, we are caught between fever and dream, between the warped realities of racialized violence and the emotional realities that adjust our inner worlds forever. Objects speak and move the fates: black mold, sugar, a dead tree, a porcelain spoon rest, a blue fiat, mussels, a paper carnation. There is no inanimate "thing" in this book; every object has agency, history, can be weaponized or used for comfort. Jackson masterfully orchestrates destinies that are pierced and dismembered before our eyes. Some "burst like a supernova" and others remain "defenseless" yet in Jackson's language, even those without protection have an archive, a voice, or find forms." - Meg Fernandes, I Do Everything I'm Told & Good Boys: Poems