Where I Must Go
A novel by Angela Jackson that follows a young woman coming of age amid the promise and exclusion of the civil-rights era.
Work Information
Classrooms, city streets, and family history come together in a single searching voice.
Through the voice of young Magdalena Grace, the novel moves between a university, a Black Midwestern neighborhood, and ancestral Mississippi. It traces the emotional cost of living where private desire and public order never quite align.
Review Summaries
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Its lyrical style and its careful treatment of difference, belonging, and historical pressure are especially well regarded.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Triquarterly Books
- Published
- 2009-09-30
- Pages
- 385 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.56 x 3.3 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780810151857
- ISBN-10
- 0810151855
- Price
- 2799 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Contemporary
Lyrical, penetrating, and highly charged, this novel displays a delicately tuned sense of difference and belonging. Poet Angela Jackson brings her superb sense of language and of human possibility to the story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement. The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi. Magdalena’s story includes a wide range of characters—black and white, male and female, favored with opportunity or denied it, the young in love and elders wise with hope. With and through each other, they struggle to understand the history they are living and making. With dazzling perceptiveness, Jackson’s narrator Magdalena tells of the complex interactions of people around her who embody the personal and the political at a crucial moment in their own lives and in the making of America.
ANGELA JACKSON is Poet Laureate of Illinois. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, she was raised on Chicago’s South Side, and educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Her Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners , winner of the 1993 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award in Poetry and the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry, and her selected poems, And All These Roads Be Luminous , are both published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern.
Reviews
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I had read a selection of this wonderful book in the Northwestern Alumni Magazine and until then, I was unaware of Angela Jackson as a writer or a poet. There were phrases in that excerpt that stuck. Throughout this book, tucked into paragraphs of story, there are micropoems; there are diamonds embedded in the strata of the prose. " My mama was thirty-five then and she was beginningness, creatrix, matrix who pulled babies out of the ethers of her laughter and kissed a wound to quiet." .... wow! There is poetry in this writing and a heartfelt story that I can begin to understand through the eyes of this narrator. The strength and craziness of family, the mixed blessings of opportunity are balanced well here. Well written, well done!