“This place is not finished with me.”
I have lived in New York for a year and some months now, and it has made me appreciate all the more my southern upbringing in North Carolina. The large, Carolina blue sky, the miles of farmland with the occasional dilapidated house from a forlorn time (that’s not so forlorn in actuality.) The canopy of tall, green pine and oak trees and the smoky autumns that bring rich color. The State Fair, the unwelcomed winters that sent its regrets with Brunswick stew and cornbread. The lush, heavily pollinated springs with promises of trips to the Daylily Farm, and long, yellow summers that gave nothing more than permission to be lazy for a time.
I find myself missing my place — sandwiched between the mountains and the coastline, two vastly different places with vastly different cultures for just one state alone. I miss the house I grew up in that my parents are currently trying to save from its own dilapidation. I miss Carolina BBQ (Eastern style, of course. Lexington style can be good) and getting the best calabash seafood in Wilmington. The memories of this place, the spaces I grew up in, was educated in, and became myself in are ones I think of fondly, but they contain icy edges that I’d rather shove in the back of my mind. The ‘Donald Trump for president’, pro-gun and anti-abortion billboards that pepper Interstate 40 going west after you pass Burlington, the constant and careless cutting down of trees that made NC the unofficial “tree state.” The deforestation makes way for cheaply constructed, high-rent apartment complexes as the Tech Bros steadily take over the central Piedmont. The plantations that are now designated as historical sites, and though this is a good thing, the generational icy edges of memory have not melted away.
What is both beautiful and ugly about the places and spaces we occupied are brought out in January Gill O’Neil’s indelible and stunning new poetry collection Glitter Road (2024). O’Neil is an established poet of several acclaimed works: Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009). O’Neil is a poet who can be soft spoken with the earth and who also commands it to open — ushering a wellspring of inner truth to be realized for herself and for her readers. That inner truth has made me giddy, crazed almost, as I noticed how my body reacted when reading Glitter Road; the energy that began to course through me was as strange as the beginning of the school year that beat the crap out of me. Only now am I receiving some mercy with the writing of this review.
I remembered that I get this way when I know I’m reading good writing, which is getting increasingly hard to come by these days. O’Neil’s poems seem simple in the free verse structure she takes to the majority of the poems in Glitter Road, with the vivid imagery of the Mississippi Delta that she paints and the motifs of nature that always have me sold in reading poetry and writing my own. These poems move powerfully beyond the ‘floweriness’ of such poetry and weave an intricate tapestry of what place and space mean to us as individuals, and what they mean as a collective world. One treatment of place that O’Neil centralizes is change, and how some of that change is merely a revamp or repackaging.
The themes of home and intimacy drive the collection, though that warmth is coupled with coldness. Her vulnerability in writing on the death of her husband and finding new love reveals these devastations. Poems such as “What’s Left” and “Narcissi in January” invoke the affect of what has changed and what is unchanging — the mundane of everyday life, but without that key person that made it alive. In the poem “I Take Off my Black Dress,” the dust of the new change begins to settle into a routine, though nothing feels the same:
“[A]s the AC kicks into overdrive.
I heat the oven, stuff it
with frozen meatballs.
Who wants to prepare a meal
much less eat it?“
The only lasting truth is change,” Octavia Butler wrote, and it can be good or bad. But even with calamity, newness can happen, the new is full of potential. As in the poem “Begin Again,” O’Neil writes furtively of the tenderness of new love in bloom, enlivening the mundane again:
“When we take our seats around the
crowded table / and face each other / the mismatched plates / the
still water / the napkins unfolded / the chatter quiets / When we
read Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here”/ it is grace
/ listen / this food is blessed by your presence / When we break
bread / together / perhaps the world begins here / begins again /
which is no small thing”
“Begin Again” ushers in another aspect to place and space that catalyzes the collection, and for me it is a reminder of the joys and tensions of relationality in a given place/space. The line “this food is blessed with your presence” underscores the southern tendencies of togetherness over food, over a good meal; food is love in the South. Throughout the collection O’Neil also shows us the troubles with relationality, in “On the Edge of a Field in Sumner, Mississippi,” she observes her relationship to the land soaked in the blood of history:
“I pick cotton
with my bare hands
in the town where Emmett Till’s
killers were acquitted
in 1955, at the bottomlands
fed by the swollen Tallahatchie.
And I can’t help but think
about the negro hands,
cracked and worn,
twisting the lock from the burr,
stripping the stalk from top
to bottom, the hard ground broken
against weather and weevils.”
I think about these lines and my own relationships to the land back home, to the land here in New York, and to the land of the United States. I remember taking a field trip with our homeschooling group to a plantation turned “historic site” thirty minutes from our house. I recall the fields where cotton used to grow, sprawling, now partly a pen for goats. I remember seeing the quarters that the enslaved Black folks lived in, and the pristine white of the “big house.” I remember the visitor center, and us hippy kids sitting in a semicircle listening to the site guide talk about slavery. I remember the presence of a cotton gin, and the site guide explaining how cotton was processed. For some reason, I remember touching raw cotton for the first time — I think there was an activity where we got to pick through it, take out the seeds, peel back the leaves, the boll white and imposing in my mind. (This was in the mid-2000s, so most likely there was an activity involving a light simulation re-enacting slavery). Reminders of the past are all around us, and O’Neil doesn’t shy away from that fact throughout Glitter Road.
“Rowan Oak” is another poem, out of many in this work, that gets into the thick of these tensions;
On this night, we tread on Southern soil
at Rowan Oak, the grand estate where Faulkner wrote
about postbellum Mississippi. We sit near
his mammy’s quarters. Like history, it is in plain view.
Eighty years before Faulkner, the enslaved who lived
and labored here built the university that now owns this space —
a constant reminder that the past is never past.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner, whom O’Neil invokes to drive home the charge. In my reader’s eyes Glitter Road (as project) intends to reiterate the adage of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” This holds true for the nation, our communities, and even ourselves. Some parts of our cores never change; the heart and the soul. On one hand this could be seen as a pessimistic view of the tumults of our relationalities in racial, gender, and class difference. It is through no faults of our own, but rather how this society was built, and the conditioning society condones its citizens. (Through work these societal conditions can be changed. It’s a matter of meaningful, world-ending work).
On an individual level this is a reassuring stance, as we are often told we will change in a myriad of ways throughout our lives. What is often overlooked is how one’s center is defined and stays, and how one’s essence remains their true essence. Poems like “Regret Nothing” and “Cartwheel” show how one’s core remains despite inner evolution and weathering all the changes of life. I was particularly drawn to the poems “Harvest” and “Postbellum,” as they sketch how one shapes a space, and how a space can shape you:
At Mississippi’s crossroads,
I’ve come to see what’s left,
what’s remained unclaimed for decades:
cypress, palmetto, tupelo, river birch.
To love the magnolia and lament the smell.
This place is not finished with me. This place is not finished with me.”
(From “Postbellum”)
I am not finished with my own unresolved and evolving relationship to home, the places I’ve been, the place I am in, and the places I am going. I am not finished with January Gill O’Neil, as she is a poet that commands the attention of the heart. I am still reveling in my thoughts. Glitter Road makes you think and rethink your own surrender to change, and how to dance with it.
Poetic Conversations: Home is Where the Heart (And Hurt) Is ~ January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road. was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.