Origin Story - (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry) by Gary Jackson (Paperback)

About the Book

origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers.

Book Synopsis

origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers.

Review Quotes

origin story is both intensely intimate and utterly everyman. These are poems of both great weight and profound lightness. . . It is impossible to read origin story and not feel obliged to think hard about one's own upbringing, impossible not to be moved and changed by what these poems bring to light.--Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal

From post-Korean War era to the present day, ongoing brutalities upon Black bodies, and the complexities of a speaker born to a Black-Asian mother and Black father, Jackson's poems in origin story reveal the porous interconnectedness of our boundaries--bloodlines, memories, trauma, silences--and how origin stories and their contested retellings hold deep roots to our sense of betrayal and belonging.--Esther Lee, author of Sacrificial Metal

In origin story, Gary Jackson delivers a work of beauty and talent. Like so much honey down our throats, he channels the voices of his mother, his grandparents, his family, and his encyclopedic knowledge of comics to create a new and necessary universe. It challenges racism and carried assumptions while creating an honest dialogue that ultimately ends with connection and compassion. These poems are where the body becomes word.--Juan Morales, author of The Handyman's Guide to End Times: Poems

Though origin story is a story of family and past, it is, of course, a story about the poet.--Jaclyn Youhana Garver, Colorado Review

About the Author

Gary Jackson is an associate professor of creative writing at the College of Charleston. He is also the author of Missing You, Metropolis, which was the winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.