American Happiness [Hardcover]

American Happiness is an eclectic collection of verse from a bold poet of everyday life, Jacqueline Allen Trimble. Ironically titled, the work addresses everything from the death of parents to racial tension to the encroachment of coyotes into urban spaces.The title is taken from a poem in the book which considers the kinder, gentler exploits of Sheriff Andy and Deputy Barney during a time when Southern law enforcement was neither universally kind or gentle. Says Trimble, Barney had one bullet/and no need for a rope./The only burning he did was for his Thelma Lou.On her poetic journey, which takes us from the personal to the political, Trimble probes our racial divide. She is by turns compassionate and fierce, cutting at our hypocrisy with the knife of her words and willing us toward our better common humanity. Jacqueline Trimble waited a long time to publish this first book, but she is right on time. I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the-flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty. And I am so grateful for her gift, her grown woman poetics. Honor?e Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Glory Gets Jacqueline Trimbles treatment of the paradoxical quality of love, of the pain of living and dying, of the blood of black history, and of a flirtation with the existential and transcendental -- these and more are written with clarity, power, beauty, and grace. American Happiness is a must read. Leonard A. Slade, Jr., Professor of Africana Studies and English, State University of New York at Albany Jacqueline Allen Trimble's first poetry collection, American Happiness, exposes the central irony we live and breathe in the United States: the jagged edge between a freedom and justice for all national ideology and our real daily lives. Through humor and horror, the slim volume's vignettes limn that dangerous divide. Trimble's words comfort our sorrow but never lie to make us feel better. She l³