Jubilee

Jubilee by Roxane Beth Johnson won the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. "These luminous poems depict a world I never knew—or know as a child and since forgot—and they do so with the authority of a totally mature voice. The artistry that unifies Jubilee is so perfect it is almost invisible. Altogether an amazing debut . . ."
—Philip Levine.

"In Jubilee, the effects of gravity are reversed in order to capture how the world weighs on the mind . . . These often deceptively measured prose poems critique not only their own form, but the structures, the foundations, of family, spirituality, and identity which we often fail to examine. Each self-portrait tells us as much about the environment as it reveals about the subject occupying them--the poet creating with a small mirror in one hand, a pen/camera/brush/etching knife in the other. . ."
—Kyle G. Dargan.