My Specific Awe and Wonder: Poems

Reuben Jackson's rhythmic and musical poems merge love, beauty, justice, and the lived Black experience in America.

My Specific Awe and Wonder is a collection of new and selected poems Jackson described as "a love letter to Vermont" with "all the potholes visible." Here are poems about his experience living in, loving, and leaving Vermont, alongside poems of his childhood, his DC neighborhood, his travels-both physical and metaphorical-and the Kelly Donaldson persona poems that tell it like it is. This collection, Jackson's third, includes poems that he called his "strongest, most evocative work." Jackson (1956-2024) left behind handwritten drafts and voicemails, which have been transcribed and compiled posthumously to keep his voice and legacy of poetry alive.

This collection includes an introduction by poet and activist LN Bethea, and a tribute poem by Rajnii Eddins, author of Their Names Are Mine.

Reuben Jackson (1956-2024), a Vermonter at heart, was a poet, jazz scholar, radio DJ, and music critic, born in Georgia and raised in Washington, DC. He graduated from Goddard College in 1978. After several years in D.C., Jackson returned to Vermont and worked as an English teacher at Burlington High School and was a mentor with The Young Writers Project. He later hosted Friday Night Jazz on Vermont Public Radio from 2012 to 2018. Jackson served as the curator of the Smithsonian's Duke Ellington Collection in Washington, D.C. and was the archivist with The University of The District Of Columbia's Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. His music reviews have been published in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Jazz Times, and featured on All Things Considered. His poems have been published in over forty anthologies, including "This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets" edited by Kwame Alexander and published by Little, Brown and Company in 2024. His first volume of poetry, "fingering the keys," which Joseph Brodsky picked for the Columbia Book Award, was published in 1991. "My Specific Awe and Wonder" is his third book.