Alabama’s Next Poet Laureate Writes Searingly About Race
“You think money can ever repay what you stole?” she asks in her third poetry collection, “Reparations Now!,” which was published in September. “Give me land, give me all the blood you ripped out of our backs, our veins.”“Give me the songs you said were yours but you know came out of our lips first,” she writes shortly after. “Give me back Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Give me back the beauty of my hair. The swell of my hips. The big of my lips. Give me back the whole Atlantic Ocean. Give me a never-ending blue. And a mule.”
...Ashley M. Jones, whose latest collection is called “Reparations Now!,” is unflinching in her criticism of those in power and the myriad inequalities in American life.
