Though origin story is a story of family and past, it is, of course, a story about the poet.--Jaclyn Youhana Garver, Colorado Review
Description
origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers. These poems take us from Kansas to Korea and back again in an attempt to reconnect with estranged family and familial ghosts divided by years of diaspora. An interrogation of cultural and personal myths, origin story wrestles with the questions: Who will remember us? How do we deal with the failures of memory? Whose stories are told?
Reviews
From post-Korean War era to the present day, ongoing brutalities upon Black bodies, and the complexities of a speaker born to a Black-Asian mother and Black father, Jackson's poems in origin story reveal the porous interconnectedness of our boundaries--bloodlines, memories, trauma, silences--and how origin stories and their contested retellings hold deep roots to our sense of betrayal and belonging.--Esther Lee, author of Sacrificial Metal
From post-Korean War era to the present day, ongoing brutalities upon Black bodies, and the complexities of a speaker born to a Black-Asian mother and Black father, Jackson's poems in origin story reveal the porous interconnectedness of our boundaries--bloodlines, memories, trauma, silences--and how origin stories and their contested retellings hold deep roots to our sense of betrayal and belonging.--Esther Lee, author of Sacrificial Metal
origin story is both intensely intimate and utterly everyman. These are poems of both great weight and profound lightness. . . It is impossible to read origin story and not feel obliged to think hard about one's own upbringing, impossible not to be moved and changed by what these poems bring to light.--Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal
