Black Jelly - by Melanie Maria Goodreaux (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Black Jelly is chicken skin, the back of a man's neck, bones, bulge, empty beds, and God. It is a collection of poems by Melanie Maria Goodreaux with photographs by Nikki Johnson being published by Fly By Night Press, a subsidiary of Gathering of the Tribes.

Black Jelly presents a roaming prodigal woman tossed from a traditional sense of home who wrestles with fitting into the tidy demands of womanhood. Goodreaux is both celebratory and pained by the struggle -- giving a womanist' lens with an honest and inward female dialogue on body, bulge, singleness, childlessness, and a cavalcade of characters that carry her through the long arc of life from kitchens to nightclubs to the realities of love, relationship, and eroticism. Black Jelly is memory-specific while offering striking commentary on the "formlessness" of being a woman. It is a reflective and relatable work that explores the messiness of tremendous sadness while also celebrating cultural roots, spiritualism, love, lust, freedom, imperfection, and forgiveness.

Black Jelly is the first solo book of poetry by Melanie Maria Goodreaux merged with personal photos and select photography of Nikki Johnson. Melanie Maria's work is raw, messy, musical, honest, and emotionally rich while leaving behind all sentimentality. Nikki Johnson's photographic style presents compelling people surrounded by personal objects while mastering visions of 'melancholy and mystery.'

Both artists bask in African-American eccentricities while mixing emblems of southern roots, religiosity, sex, death, and transformation. The two bring their southern roots to the work.

Both women moved to New York City, lived in the East Village, and met Fly By Night Publisher, the legendary Steve Cannon of A Gathering of the Tribes, called the "Father of the Lower East Side Arts movement" by the New York Times. Steve introduced the two, and history was made. Nikki Johnson has been a documentarian of poet and playwright Melanie Maria Goodreaux ever since, representing 20 years of New York City living, from the East Village to Harlem -- with all the art and malaise in between presented in Black Jelly.

Review Quotes

"Here is Black Jelly. With verve, with power, with provocative flair, Goodreaux honors the body electric, the fullness of her mind, and strength of her humanity. Forged by the heat of history and cultural geographies, we go places where fig leaves fail to hide, folk wisdoms that celebrate divine visions and black womanhood."

-- Major Jackson, author and one of New York Times' Black Male Writers of Our Times, Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review.

..".a raucous, erotic, unflinching celebration of pain, love, loss, joy -- and the intersections between them. Goodreaux's verses and Johnson's images form a tapestry of deliciously potent visual testimonies of raw experience. This collection constructs an index of the beautiful conundrum related to being a black Southern woman in the United States..."

-- John Jennings, New York Times best-selling author. Illustrator of Octavia Butler's KINDRED

"The poems of Black Jelly are deftly-rendered, personal and musical. Buck-jumping images jingle to a sardonic backbeat. Tight, percussive lines boom in an urban pocket. Goodreaux's parade-scape mashes up New Orleans and New York City as it waves you into a funky second line strut. One woman's body -- the emotional-physical geography of her -- leads the way. Lines traverse the page like animated trolley tracks mapping a woman's ebulliently lived and complicated journey. Nikki Johnson's photo portrait wonders are textural moods of emotional skin."

-- Janice A. Lowe, author, Leaving CLE poems of nomadic dispersal

"Black Jelly is a gorgeous gumbo of passion and pain, memories and mojo, recipes for vulnerability and triumphs. A testimony of love's thorns and sweet fragrance. A beautiful offering of a woman free and honest and boldly unafraid to be naked and let her black jelly shake."

-- Liza Jessie Peterson, author of ALL DAY: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island and The Peculiar Patriot

"This is a shimmering debut from Melanie Goodreaux in collaboration with Nikki Johnson. While down home and eye-twitching in its truths and realness, Goodreaux's poetry collection is also sweet-sweet and beautifully crafted. Black Jelly is a profoundly jarring, compelling and masterful shaping of meta-concepts brought together. This book is to be savored with all the senses."

-- Tracie Morris, author, handholding: 5 kinds and Who Do With Words