About Jennifer Bartell
Jennifer Bartell (Boykin) is the Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia, SC. She received the MFA in Poetry from the University of South Carolina and her debut collection Traveling Mercy appeared in 2023. An alumna of Agnes Scott College, she is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow and has received additional fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole.
Praise for Only Believe
There are two stories in Only Believe—the story of a girl who doesn’t know how or when to tell what happened to her, and the story of her grandma, whose house is a place of both refuge and danger, whose decline into Alzheimer’s is a counterpoint to the speaker’s own struggles with memory. Memory, as Jennifer Bartell reminds us, is neither window nor mirror nor veil, but all at the same time. Religion promises answers—“My Black Jesus can do anything”—but tricks her into blame and shame instead. Something happened to that girl and she knows that “it’s time to speak / it’s time to heal.” The only way to do that is by telling both stories, that of the girl struggling to speak, and that of the grandmother, whose life reminds her that “God is a woman / on a big black Singer / sewing machine,” whose quilts became her tablets, whose needle becomes her pen. —Ed Madden, author of A pooka in Arkansas and Ark
Only Believe is a sort of blues midrash, transposing ancient stories from the Bible and traditions of the sanctified Black church, in which Bartell’s speaker was raised, into the story of a young girl’s struggle to believe in herself. From its opening “Oh” of praise to its penultimate “Behold: It is good,” this collection is one coherent whole, a story that grips us as it recreates the world of the speaker’s rural childhood, where she is watched over by her grandmother Moonsie, the tutelary presence brooding over this story and its teller like a spirit over the deep, the turbulent water of the speaker’s inner life, until the speaker can finally break the silencing spell of abuse and find her own self-affirmation. —Carolyne Wright, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems
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