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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Outlandish Blues

(Wesleyan University Press, 2003)

reviewed by Alia Boyle

Outlandish Blues is the most recent book of poetry by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. She has come to Michigan for various readings and she is coming to read at Grand Valley State University in February 2006. Besides writing poetry, Jeffers also works as an assistant English professor at the University of Oklahoma. Her first book of poetry, The Gospel of Barbeque won the Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry in 1999. She has also received various other awards for her poetry in addition to having her work published in numerous literary magazines. Currently she is working on her third book of poetry and her first book of collected fiction. Jeffers grew up in South Carolina and Georgia and traces of the southern culture makes its way into her poetry.
      One element of southern culture that presents itself in her poetry is that of the blues. Even the title, Outlandish Blues sings, introduces the blues theme that carries through out the entire collection. The words themselves almost demand to be read aloud. There is a strong voice behind them and they strive to be transformed from written words to spoken words. All of the poems are either about women or from a woman’s point of view. They speak of the struggles women go through and the things women have endured. For example, the second section of the book contains poems from the point of view of Sarai, Hagar and Lot’s wife, all women from the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Qur’an.
      Her style of poetry often does not use punctuation but instead uses line breaks to indicate the end of a sentence or thought. She experiments with spacing in some of her poems where she eliminates all punctuation. An example of this can be found in her poem “The Book of Alabama: Chapter Coltrane:”

I’ve been plagued by spirits visitations
of death fire feeding off sheeted
breath Sometimes I see the bones
of God’s back turned to me

Jeffers also makes use of repetition in her poetry. In some of her poetry she will repeat a line from the previous stanza and change the words a little but the meaning remains the same. At times this develops the story within the poem. For example, a couple lines from “Pantoum for a Black Man on a Greyhound Bus” are, “My real brothers mother died on her kitchen floor” (14) and “I think of my stepmother murdered on her floor” (17). The situation the narrator is in reminds her of her brother and how he murdered his mother and ended up in jail, just like his father.
      Outlandish Blues is a wonderful collection of poetry that is vibrant and passionate. Each poem has something to say and says in a beautiful way. They are not “woe is me” types of poems but instead they emphasize the beauty in the difficulties of life through the use of the blues and words that come alive.

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Alia Boyle is an undergraduate in the Writing Department at GVSU.