I.S. Jones

 “Spells of my Name speaks to the power of naming as an act of reclamation, making peace with the past to find a window to the future. I.S. Jones is in awe of bodies and opening the body into a new language, probing the micro histories of the heart and asking urgent questions, like: ‘Why do any of us return / to that which has promised to slaughter us?’ Navigating sexuality, memory, and identity is a voice torn into multiple selves. This fracturing is full of diversions and sharp bends—a black fawn that the speaker transforms into as she bounds and leaps between poems while being chased by the faceless hunter. Jones searches for home, a place wherever “memory takes mercy on me.” Spells of My Name is unflinching, confessional, timely, and fluid with grace.”

Review(s) for Spells of My Name:

Pleiades: “One of Jones’ most striking rebellions is her poetic refusal to assimilate, the undoing of Americanization. In her “Interview with the American / Nigerian” series, the title itself resists the usual coupling we see in the title of “African American.” Grammatically, even the order of “African American” casts the word “African” as an adjective, a descriptor of the type of American one may be (because one is American before anything else).”

Poetry Society of America: “In its title, this chapbook announces itself as incantation. As I cycle in and out of poems on sex and sexuality, violence and faith, nationality, and the other mazes through which we all work to define ourselves, I feel the collection unfurling like a tightly crafted spell.”

River Mouth Review: “I was astounded by how Jones deftly weaves etymology into her making lyrical and conceptual leaps, which pushes her poems’ forms forward.”

The Poetry Question: “This entire collection is a canal–a wrenching chasm opening for rebirth–a witness to the psyche, split apart, in a world ruled by men who abandoned their humanity for the sake of domination.”

Interview(s) for Spells of My Name:

“Language as a Threshold” I.S. Jones on Spells of My Name”: “In the five years since I’ve encountered Itiola’s work, I’ve only known it to be as generous in its honesty and vulnerability as it is unrelenting in its vigor and energy. I don’t think every good chapbook has to compel you to finish it in one sitting, but many of the best often do. They demand, as is their right, to be the object of your attention, to not be perceived as a mere mini-collection.”