Traveling Mercy by Jennifer Bartell

After reading a single magnificent poem in Traveling Mercy, “the sapling in your chest floods with too much water and light.” Read a handful of poems, and find yourself on the poet’s ferry crossing the river “between thens and tomorrows.” Every magical, existential line is an iteration of Jennifer Bartell’s dextrous poetics. This accomplished debut elegizes human loss while celebrating the resilience that persists through witness and language. Traveling Mercy is a dazzling first book.

–Terrance Hayes

Bartell’s Traveling Mercy is such an intimate history of a Black girl raised by Black women, raised by church fans and magnolia memories, dream-hymns of Black people pushing through mud and disease and held together by traditions. This rich collection of poems, by a Black girl who knows how and why to style okra seeds in her hair, spills with fat oysters and a community’s petrified pounded grace. Bartell assures she will never give us one chance to hold our breath, as we jump into this never-ending deep end of blazing life, therefore, prepare to be drenched.

–Nikky Finney