Neighborhood Register

From the twilight towns of the Rust Belt to the vivid inlets of New York City, Neighborhood Register is a ledger of the people, scenes, and sectors from which hidden music and meaning unearth. The collection evokes the beauties and difficulties within multi-racial families, the value of vernacular, and the unexpected resonances of common objects.

Marcus Jackson was born in Toledo, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among many other publications. He has received fellowships from New York University and Cave Canem. His debut collection of poetry, Neighborhood Register, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2011.

Ode to Kool-Aid
You turn the kitchen
tap’s metallic stream
into tropical drink,
extra sugar whirlpooling
to the pitcher-bottom
like gypsum sand.
Purplesaurus Rex, Roarin’
Rock-A-Dile Red, Ice Blue
Island Twist, Sharkleberry Fin;
on our tongues, each version
keeps a section, like tiles
on the elemental table.
In ninth grade, Sandra
employed a jug of Black Cherry
to dye her straightened
bangs burgundy.
When toddlers swallow you,
Their top lips mustache in color
As if they’ve kissed paint.
The trendy folks can savor
all that imported mango nectar
and health-market juice.
We need factory-crafted packets,
unpronounceable ingredients,
a logo cute enough to hug,
a drink unnaturally sweet
so that, on the porch,
as summer sun receded,
Granddad takes out his teeth
to make more mouth to admit you.

In Neighborhood Register, his fine first collection of poems, Marcus Jackson lyrically knits together time, memory, human desires and obligations and invites the kind reader to dance along to his bright measures, which sometimes resemble the life of a young poet, deeply enmeshed in the world, and sometimes reflect like a mirror.
— Cornelius Eady

The map refolds, roads jumble as if/ a suitcase of sentences,” says Marcus Jackson, and indeed Neighborhood Register is a kind of questing, the poems themselves road songs in which Jackson presents indelible portraits from a life lived hard, lived honestly or as honestly as possible. The voices here sing from the “selective heavens” that they need to believe in, given the heart that’s been fooled, given how “Nice cars, pretty people/ have you thinkin’ that they stable,/ but beauty so easy to break.” Like Langston Hughes, Jackson uses the clearest language to celebrate the complexity and durability of the human will.
— Carl Phillips

September 2011
92 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-25-9