Lullaby for the Grieving

With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing”, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is her most personal collection to date.

In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?

Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.

Praise for Ashley M. Jones

“Ashley M. Jones’s poems are at once history, sermons, and soul songs. With gorgeous imagery, tender attention, and abundant love she weaves a tapestry of the Black South that is as beautiful as it is honest and heart-wrenching. A truth-teller in verse, Jones reaches into the past to teach us courage in the present. I highly recommend this important book.” —Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues : How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is hallowed, haunting song. This book meditates on the loss of a beloved father with tender lyric. Jones is one of the best poets writing today and these poems are compelling evidence. The poems are formally rigorous, deeply affecting, and possess a moral clarity too often lacking in contemporary discourse. This is one of my favorite books.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna

“In a few lines, she can slip from weary to witty to wary—but never defeated.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

“What a massive undertaking, and what an achievement.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune For Your Disaster for Reparations Now!

“The poet reckons with a seemingly ceaseless grief while acknowledging the light that keeps us facing forward--the fact that being beautiful and black does not require a revolution.” —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“Jones manifests space to feel all of the feelings that come with being Black in a world that constantly seeks to snuff out Blackness.” —Ashia Ajani, EcoTheo Review

“Ashley M. Jones is a genius in how she wields, innovates, and wades through a bounty of poetic forms (sonnets, an aubade, a ghazal, a contrapuntal, anaphora, the subjunctive mode and so much more) with a sense of mastery, levity, and play.” —Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood 

“Jones’s poems are alive with ghost and kin, God and Black girls, and all are sung, SANG really, under her capable hand.” —Danez Smith, Author of [insert] boy

“Ashley M. Jones is exact and exacting.” —Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament