Every Hard Sweetness

(Paperback)

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Sheila Carter-Jones Every Hard Sweetness is, on its surface, a collection that documents the experiences of a young African-American girl growing up in a small coal mining town up North during the Civil Rights Movement. However, peel back these initial layers and find an exercise in the historical record, a collection of incidents reflective of ongoing racial and class conflicts in an increasingly polarized United States.

The landscape of the US documented by Carter-Jones is marked by an undercurrent of interconnectedness, one that rejects the individual and encourages people to look beyond the skin of self. Every Hard Sweetness is a book that acts as a balm, one that transcends differences to emphasize empathy as the core of all community care.

Reviews

Every Hard Sweetnessis an extraordinary work of history and possibility. Within the brutal conditions of every state-sanctioned terror against her family, the poet makes a brilliant record of a deeply disciplined, steadfast tenderness. Placing her art practice beside that of her fathers, she asks readers to think with her about personal, familial, and national imaginations. Out of these conditions,SheilaCarter-Jones creates a stunning, experimental work that pushes on the edges of what language can even hold, making a work that asks its readers to engage in an ongoing practice of attention, scrutiny, and care. These arrangements touch me into new thinking and feeling, across time.

Aracelis Girmay,author of the black maria

Every Hard Sweetness is testament to the adage that stories indeed matter, especially a story as powerful as this one. Through her expert command of richly textured language and striking imagery, Sheila Carter-Jones chronicles the racism that led to her fathers detainment at a state hospital for the criminally insane, the resulting family trauma, their attempts to recover, and her own ongoing struggles as a Black female in America. With the authoritative and unflinching voice of an emotional historian, these poems document and expose the racism and bigotry that still haunt America, through the personal as well as public lens. And yet, for all the hard moments of this story, there is also a kind of sweetness in the way that the poet renders tender family moments, honors victims of injustice, commands herself in the world, rises above it, and holds on to hope.

Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet

"In powerful and incandescent poems, Carter-Jones deftly navigates the ongoing repercussions of this haunting family historyrevealing cultural contexts of colorism, misogynoir, and white supremacy. This extraordinary and important book illustrates the ways in which anti-Black violence can be brutally whitewashed under the guise of institutional and bureaucratic complicity. At the same time, Every Hard Sweetness insists on celebrating Black courage, Black resilience, and Black joy in poems that are riveting, heartbreaking, and gorgeous.

Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

Every Hard Sweetness is a fabulous combination of old school storytelling and vibrant hybrid experimentation. On one hand, Sheila Carter-Jones masterfully weaves poems out of genres of history, memoir, and folklore even archival photographs and visual art act as poetry in this inventive collection. On the other hand, whatever the form, Carter-Jones weaves masterful stories from the mercurial feelings and rhythms of everyday experience. Every time I read this brilliant book some new mastery unfolds. Sheila Carter-Jones is simply a badass poet.

Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead

In Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones refracts a personal story and larger history of America: her fathers unjust six-and-half-year incarceration in a mental hospital in the 1960s and her coming-of-age and coming to terms with the trauma of her familys story is set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing struggle for freedom for Black Americans. Carter-Jones powerfully wields various forms, including photographs, to recover the past, resulting in a work that is a moving testament to the art of staying alive. In poem after poem, Carter-Jones counters erasure, fearlessly filling the geography of silence.

Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

Author Bio

Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author ofThree Birds Deep, the winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooksBlackberry Cobbler Song and Crooked Star Dream Book.Sheila is a fellow of Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her poetry has been published in Crossing Limits, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pennsylvania Review, Tri-State Anthology, Riverspeak, Flights: The Literary Journal of Sinclair College, Coal: A Poetry Anthology, City Paper, Cave Canem Anthology, Jewish Currents, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Women Speak, Mom Egg Review, Northside Chronicle, Platform Review, South Dakota Review, Shepherd University Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Butler Books: The Boom Project, Low Ghost Press, Labor, Rune Literary Collection and other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA from Carlow University where she facilitates writing workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic Program. Her work also appears in several volumes of Madwomen Anthologies. Her newest book Every Hard Sweetness is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in the spring of 2024.