HOOD VACATIONS (2023)
Michal “MJ” Jones’ debut Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling – an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: “We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust.” The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, & bringing back “rainbow soap colors”. It is a book of passing – as, through, and on. Hop on in.
Praise for HOOD VACATIONS
Hood Vacations is a massive triumph of lyric, of narrative brilliance, of imagery. But, above all, this book is generously transportative. The page becomes a portal through which a place emerges, and then becomes as familiar as your own home.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Hood Vacations is a tender debut that takes us on a journey of Black childhood in the suburbs, the awakening of political consciousness, and the self-determination of young adulthood. It is a narrator that goes from child to parent, and the attendant worries and joys that come from being responsible for growing life. Jones deploys a variety of received and innovative poetic forms that engage in a formal shaping and reshaping of content to produce different registers of praise, recollection, and discernment. Like an afternoon of listening to the smooth jazz channel, we move through a set of biological and social relationships that imbricate the narrator in a web of becoming.
-Arisa White
It is a rare gift to read a first book by a poet whose vision is so sharp and who knows how to articulate it in a poem. Jones has so much to say and they know how to say it. I am enthralled by what I learn from these poems but I am in awe of their seriousness, their care, and their reach.
-Juliana Spahr
Hood Vacations is a melodically precise collection of journeys away from, back towards, and directly into what is both familiar and refreshing. A series of scene-setting poems inviting the reader to dine at a table prepared with an African diasporic flare. These poems are packed with lines of tiny songs that read like the blackest and most urgent spells being cast. For our protection, for our re-memory, for our future.
-Darius Simpson
SOFT ARMOR (2023)
SOFT ARMOR is a meditation on love in its many enactments and forms —romantic, parental, ecological, spiritual, and communal. It is an insistence on being in love with a burning, disappearing, and increasingly elusive world, each poem its own testimony.
Praise for SOFT ARMOR
“SOFT ARMOR is an offering of tenderness, of witness, of hope. As a ‘quiet seer,’ Jones urges readers not to look away from ecological crisis, late-capitalist brutality, and racist violence, but to ‘praise what remains,’ whether romantic love, familiar nurturance, or enduring beauty of the natural world. There's no better poet to ‘unpack the wild wild of it,’ leading the reader into a future that we can only build together.” —Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, author of Look Alive
“SOFT ARMOR is a passionate phoenix of love poems birthed out of the refuse of a Necropastoral landscape, where the poet embraces the wisdom and devastation of our natural and unnatural world to boldly indulge and relish the intimacy of self-love, romantic love, and love flowing from parent to child, body to earth and back completing a circuit that declares ‘I am more here than I ever have been.’ MJ’s lexicon of love is an assertion of being alive at the End of the World and loving on purpose.” —Nefertiti Asanti, author of fist of wind
“a tunnel of true love: where the body, the spirit, the allure of intimacy & reverie meet. Michal “MJ” Jones has led us down a pathway of sweet heat, inviting us to soften our ethos into a cloud of earthy constellations begging to braid itself together. SOFT ARMOR grounds us into the heart & a wonderland of multiple heavens; cooing its readers to ponder: what is our lovemaking without the bravery to see another fully? can our shadows dance even after the heart breaks? is sweetness an elixir of life or a spell cast simply highlighting the fruit of god? how was there a me before meeting/knowing/raising you? where will the compass of our feet lead us next? this collection invites us to stay in the frequency of love on all levels. it’s lushness. it’s unwavering trunk. it’s ever-revolving leaves. even the mud made of the dirt it grows from. it reminds us to be rooted in our desires. our hopes. our dreams. our lessons. our bodies & our willingness to dig deeper into our possibilities than ever before.” —Mimi Tempestt, author of the monumental misremembering
“In cadence and hue, Michal Jones offers us a sensual sanctuary in SOFT ARMOR. What better way to describe gentle scars than through ‘God’s melodious hands.’ What endearing language Jones offers us here, first through the possibility of image —a dipped tongue swelling, then through the candor of love. I am in debt to Jones for writing what they must: a blueprint for affinity, a manual on sentiment and an assemblage we should arm ourselves with.” —Daniel B. Summerhill, Author of DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE
“In SOFT ARMOR Jones christens us with concise stanzas embedded in flourish and temperature; how the arcs are vibrant and achy with richness! The range of approach this text brings, opens up a vulnerable heart: ‘you’ve got gumption to pack as many supernovas into this thin life.’ Yes, to the gumption found in these pages whether housed in Oakland or Sedona, each compromised of morsels of grace, anguish, and irrevocable queer tenderness. Let this book vex us and bring us balm, remind us there is room for incalculable love “with eyes wide open & steady.” —Kay Ulanday Barrett, author of More Than Organs