A Shelf Awareness 2025 Best Bookof the Year
Southern Literary Review's Best Poetry Book of the Year
Maya Angelou Book Award 2025, Poetry, longlist
With previous work hailed by the New York Times as "unflinching" and "piercing", Ashley M. Jones'sLullaby for the Grievingis her most personal collection to date.
In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?
Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father's garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama's first Black and youngest Poet Laureate,Lullaby for the Grievingfinds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.
About the Author :
Ashley M. Jones and other publications. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is currently a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University. She is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama.
Review :
PRAISE FOR ASHLEY M. JONES
“Despite this heaviness, the collection feels buoyant, luminous, bold. It is an incomparably fine meal, each poem to be savored, each so good as to make readers doubt the next poem could measure up. But it does. It always does.” —Sara Beth West, Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
“Ashley M. Jones’s poems are at once history, sermons, and soul songs. With gorgeous imagery, tender attention, and abundant love she weaves a tapestry of the Black South that is as beautiful as it is honest and heart-wrenching. A truth-teller in verse, Jones reaches into the past to teach us courage in the present. I highly recommend this important book.” —Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues : How a Color Tells the Story of My People
“Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is hallowed, haunting song. This book meditates on the loss of a beloved father with tender lyric. Jones is one of the best poets writing today and these poems are compelling evidence. The poems are formally rigorous, deeply affecting, and possess a moral clarity too often lacking in contemporary discourse. This is one of my favorite books.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna
“Jones tackles spiritual matters, healing, the strength and comfort of community, the enduring nature of love—and even joy. The poems are intense, musical, vibrant, visceral, and glorious.” —Claire Matturro, Southern Literary Review
“Known for her piercing prose on Black womanhood, life in the American South and past and present-day manifestations of racism in Alabama, [Jones is] a Black woman who is unflinching in her criticism of those in power, the censorship of Black history in schools, housing discrimination, police violence and the ways racism and white supremacy persist.” —New York Times
“In a few lines, she can slip from weary to witty to wary—but never defeated.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
“What a massive undertaking, and what an achievement.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune For Your Disaster for Reparations Now!
“The poet reckons with a seemingly ceaseless grief while acknowledging the light that keeps us facing forward—the fact that being beautiful and black does not require a revolution.” —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“Jones manifests space to feel all of the feelings that come with being Black in a world that constantly seeks to snuff out Blackness.” —Ashia Ajani, EcoTheo Review
“Ashley M. Jones is a genius in how she wields, innovates, and wades through a bounty of poetic forms (sonnets, an aubade, a ghazal, a contrapuntal, anaphora, the subjunctive mode and so much more) with a sense of mastery, levity, and play.” —Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
“Jones’s poems are alive with ghost and kin, God and Black girls, and all are sung, SANG really, under her capable hand.” —Danez Smith, Author of [insert] boy
“Ashley M. Jones is exact and exacting.” —Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament
“Lullaby for the Grieving is a warm blanket pockmarked with spurs that the speaker wastes no time in plucking off one by one to sing, at times, a sorrowful and jubilant song of adoration for her people!” —Richard Hamilton, Bear Review
“The specificity of the poems about her father are what make Jones’s work universal. The grief feels raw and real because the love feels so deep and true [...]. Even if you’re not a lover of literature, even if you can’t name the different poetic devices and forms that Jones masterfully employs in this collection, these poems are for you. You’ll find yourself highlighting lines that you’ll read again and again, not because you don’t understand them but because you do. Because you feel them or perhaps you have even lived them.” —Javacia Harris Bowser, The Birmingham Times
“Such optimism, tempered by realism and emboldened with inner strength, is not easy to come by [...]. Jones [...] is working at her peak in Lullaby for the Grieving. This collection is filled with love, caution, correction, and ferocity. It exudes the voice of a poet confident in her righteousness, something we can all learn from.” —Matthew Duffus, Southern Review of Books
