Traveling Mercy

by Jennifer Bartell

Overview

Traveling Mercy navigates the journeys of a Black woman from rural South Carolina. Her travels transcend time as she encounters history, nature, and grief. She sits with the eldest residents before her birth, with the first ancestor who came to these shores, with her parents through their marriage, and through her own loneliness in the wake of their deaths. Planting as she harvests, this book is a lament and a love story to survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781599242644
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	11/17/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	76
File size:	981 KB

About the Author

Jennifer Bartell is a poet and teacher from Columbia, SC. She was born and raised in Bluefield, a community of Johnsonville, SC. She received the MFA in Poetry from the University of South Carolina. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian, Callaloo, pluck!, As/Us, Jasper Magazine, the museum americana, Scalawag, and Kakalak, among others. An alumna of Agnes Scott College, Jennifer has fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. She teaches high school English. This is her first full-length book of poetry.

Table of Contents

I. Departures 

Traveling Mercy1

A Re-Minder3

Insomnia4

When you write your mother's obituary,5

Mercy8

Mudskipper10

Thread11

Time is Everything12

Flowers for the Living15

Seashells16

Her Who Peopled We17

Scaling18

The Road to Being Born19

II. Arrivals

Insomnia23

Woman of Steel24

Survivor Call & Response25

The Moon & Me26

What Marriage Is27

Fried Chicken-Neck Dinner29

Dear Mikey,30

The Setting Up31

My Father's Shakespeare33

S'posin35

Leaves Like Prayer36

L.J.'s Last Will & Testament37

Lynches River, A Legacy38

How to Die at a Wedding39

What Marriage Is40

White Shoulders43

III. Returns

Insomnia47

The Road to Being Born48

the poet is thirty49

Alice & Bessie50

Ars Poetica51

Taking Flight53

Green Thumbs Elegy55

Dear Ma & Da,56

The Okra57

Notes 58

Acknowledgements60

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher