Muscadine (Stahlecker Selections) - Softcover

Avant, A. H. Jerriod

Softcover

ISBN 10: 195424570X ISBN 13: 9781954245709

Publisher: Four Way Books, 2023

Synopsis

A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin [that] teeth / pierce breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty — appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette. In all seasons, the tongue’s subversive intelligence sculpts this masterwork of love, grace, conflict, and grief. This book tastes summer and the “ruins of / an afternoon” at once; it explores the language that testifies to loss while illuminating the abundance that loss obscures. Avant accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past. Don’t forget, he tells us. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger.” See how the weather changes swiftly and forever: “Look / how pops left before we // thought he was done.” But notice, too, how an echo sounds remembrance: “Listen, / how the voice of a dead man // can live.” He commands us to take the brief blooms with us, says, “Pack me a bag / I can fit in my heart.”

About this title

About the Author

A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. A graduate of Jackson State University, Jerriod has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. He’s received scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. A former resident at the James Castle House and Vermont Studio Center, Jerriod has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pinwheel, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Obsidian, The Yale Review, and other journals. He’s currently a Ph.D. English candidate (Spring 2023) at the University of Rhode Island and a Teaching Fellow in English at Wesleyan University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What Deer Season Means to Me

In the house there were always two
white deep freezers packed pretty
decent with red meat. Deer season,
the hunters and the deer would satisfy
rent in season, by meat if not by cash.
It was May, I was fifteen and we smelled 
fifteen or so throughout the warm insides
of the man-handled school bus, when pops 
steers quick and clear to dodge the deer
and Shirlean yells, “I didn’t even know it was 
deer season.” As if deer only lived so they 
could be killed during deer season.
What’s a deer outside of deer season, 
except a reason for deer season?

Edition details

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 195424570X
• ISBN 13: 9781954245709
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 81