TRILLION AMBER TRUMPETS

by

JC ANDREWS​​

Arkansas Queer Poet Series #3

​

These poems stop me in my tracks, make me bend down to get closer. I follow JC Andrews into the smokehouse and through the cornfield, where she makes a music all her own while nodding to the greats—Yusef Komunyakaa, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, the moons and night dark angels of Frank Stanford. Hers is a song spun from the power and courage of staying. Wait till you get to the TRINKET poems, which work in the way of water carving a path, water that as Toni Morrison reminds us, “has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” I stand in tender awe, witness to this poet’s everything heart—a place she attends with such devotion. An Arkansas place alive with mothers & grandmothers, aunts & uncles, cousins, cows, starlings, chickens, pianos, lesbian girlhood, risk, loneliness, fear, telephones with long curly cords, and above all, love. In spite of and alongside what hurts. Love that says, “you are allowed / to believe in everything” and “I think most / of us we want / to be good to / each other.” These poems will take your face into their hands and love you no matter what.

 

—janan alexandra, author of come from

 

There is a beautiful, calm softness that slides along fierceness in these carefully crafted poems. JC Andrews is a poet to watch out for. Take your time, savor each juicy, delicious image, and relish in the surprises. Each poem opens like a blooming bud or like a firecracker held in a palm, offering a powerful, colorful explosion, up close and personal. 

 

—Marguerite L. Harrold, author of Chicago House Music

 

Tender, strange the way the moment between bud and blossom is strange, so easy to get beautifully lost in, TRILLION AMBER TRUMPETS is the kind of collection that rewrites you in small, permanent ways. I’ll hold it under my tongue the next time I look at a picture of my complicated-to-love mother, imagine someone else’s hands as I touch my own face, or feel suddenly responsible for my life in a garden. Andrews’s voice bumps with the “freaky beat of youth,” “like / a language under / the one I know,” nesting surprise after surprise line after line, as poems come shaped like contrapuntals, feathers, poems, telephone wires. The work swells with a carefully electric attention, which makes everything–the pasta-drying methods of grandmothers, figs, how grass grows over a grave–feel massive, intimate, mysterious, and revelatory. “but do / you need a voice / that loves you,” andrews asks. I do. We do. Oh, we do.

 

—Ty Raso, author of Mirror Would Be a Beautiful Name for a Child