Spells of My Name • Print Only

Summary

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.

Details

• Selected for the 2021 Emerging Poets Chapbook Series
• Saddle-stitched, risograph cover, 48 pages, 5″ x 7.25″, FSC-certified paper
• Order print + e-book
• Order e-book only

Praise

“In Spells of My Name, I.S. Jones builds a poetics that ‘survives translation’—a lyric force which carves space for the multiplicities of self implicit to her speaker’s being and, in the same breath, insistently casts out every misnaming, every failed imagination thereof, from the sacred fields of these poems. As these questions of language become entangled with questions of landscape, Jones builds a future for the pastoral mode: a necessary reckoning, in conversation with a long lineage of diasporic poets demanding better elsewheres, better language for body, land, and the space between. ‘I want to open the body into a new language,’ writes Jones in her opening poem. Listen. In every arrival, shedding, troubling, beyonding, and transformation of a name, these poems are nothing short of pure magic.”
        —George Abraham, author of Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020)

“‘There are so many names I’ve been called / but none belong to me,” I.S. Jones writes. In Spells of My Name, I.S. Jones charts a course to translate the untranslatable—which is to say, to translate oneself. One’s name, one’s being, one’s gods, one’s desires. These poems press forward in exploring, with refined skill. Jones holds a magnifying glass up to every part of themselves, attempting to name, then rename, then name again. In so doing, we’re left with poems complicated and vast, that leave the reader excited for more. This is a poet to watch, a poet to admire, a poet whose truths bring us evermore truth and an ever expanding closeness to self.”
        —Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us

“Imbuing the heaviness of heritage with rhythms of the hunt, I.S. Jones, in this volume, moves us into ‘Fields of selves.’ Through desire and all the animal impulses, through trust and transatlantic traumas, the lyric speakers find themselves on borders of identity, of history and myth, reality and dream, with voices always perched on the edge of soft and sharp. This is a poet for whom language is that spiritual project of self-recognition as ‘fragmented pieces of the Singular.’ Spells of My Name lives in such assurance, and at the same time—because recognition involves naming, and indeed, being named by the world—in the deep, rich shadows of doubt.”
        —Logan February, author of In The Nude

“Spells of My Name by I.S. Jones is a collection that viscerally illustrates the life of a third-culture redacted individual in America. To be a Nigerian-American, to be once-removed from one’s homeland into a land that knows nothing of home is an experience that knows a certain violence like no other. I.S.’s words digest the reality of having to swallow multiple names and thus multiple identities, the reality of being continually misspoken for and misrepresented and thus a redacted and piecemeal version of one’s true self. ‘there are so many names i’ve been called/ i said to memory, but none belong to me.’”
        —Melissa Ferrer &, review in The Poetry Question

Author

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and former music journalist. Her honors include fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Brooklyn Poets, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. She is one-third of The Luminaries, an online space which provides free poetry programming and reading events. She is the founder and facilitator of The Singing Bullet: A month-long online poetry workshop.

Artwork

Cover by LK James.