Angele Ellis: “no margin on these pages of skin history”

In Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones weaves a personal and cultural history of racism into poetry. 

Every Hard Sweetness by Sheila Carter-Jones. BOA Editions (American Poets Continuum Series), 2024.

The late Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro is praised for crafting short stories with the richness of novels—by employing multiple narrators, flashbacks and flash-forwards into her characters’ lives, grounding her work in specific times and places, and using accessible language. In Every Hard Sweetness, her second full-length collection, the American poet Sheila Carter-Jones accomplishes a similar feat of memory and imagination. 

The pivot of this remarkable book is the incarceration of the poet’s father—a proud and outspoken dark-skinned Black man whose existence had angered racist local authorities—in a hospital for the criminally insane. This happened in 1965, in small-town Pennsylvania.

In “Gone-Dead,” Carter-Jones uses the form of a dictionary poem to encompass both this searing event (which swallowed six and a half years of a family’s life) and its historical context:

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In describing her process of writing Every Hard Sweetness for an April 2024 Q&A with Poets & Writers Magazine, Carter-Jones explains: “…I moved from one connecting poem to another—whether in time, space, or personal and public experience—in order to create the appearance of one endless experience that African American people go through at various times and places, and always. And I must admit that I didn’t know I was doing this until the poems made me aware of the unconscious movement that was taking place. I learned more deeply that creative energy has a way of doing its own thing—and to trust it and fight against allowing my mind to censor it.”

One of the ways that Carter-Jones fights against self-censorship is through poems that recreate her father’s experience of incarceration. “The Flowering,” whose epigraph is from the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, recounts in free verse a prison beating and the vivid memories of home that it awakens in its victim:

And in “Prisoners Round,” Carter-Jones evokes, in two terse sextets and a quintet, the soul-crushing conformity and monotony of institutional life (each verse concludes with the solo line “This is training”):

On the page facing “Prisoners Round” is the poem “Cigarette Currency,” which features a photograph of a wallet handmade from woven cigarette packs, one of three that Carter-Jones’s father sent home from the institution. “One survived. Holds no dollar / bills. Only memories of how he and his family / got tucked between tightly folded creases.” 

Photographs provide both punctuation and additional layers of meaning in Every Hard Sweetness. The book’s cover photograph—also reproduced in the text, with cracks of time and age left untouched—is of the author’s father at age four. His knee socks and t-strap shoes are enough to bring a reader to tears. The book’s dedication to Carter-Jones’s parents includes a photo of the couple—young and handsome—looking out of the frame. (A reader may imagine that these two are peering into an as yet-unimaginable future—his work as a chauffeur, hers as a domestic, the racist injustice that would try to destroy them—or merely doing their best to preserve a happy, hopeful present.)

The inclusion of photographs helps to link the father’s prison stories to stories of his family, both past and present—as much as the fact that Carter-Jones includes a poem titled “Hard Sweetness” in five of this book’s six sections. Section 2’s “Hard Sweetness” recalls the author’s birth and truth-telling heritage:

Carter-Jones “realigns the stars” in poems that describe the microaggressions—or death by a thousand cuts—that she, a retired professor as well as a published poet, has experienced in adulthood. “What We Learned,” set at a high school reunion, describes a bleak encounter with a white classmate:

“Cancelled Order,” based on an exchange with a young white waitress at a restaurant during a poetry reading, turns up both the heat and the coldness to the danger point:

In “American Beauty: The Redress” (followed in the book by “The Tiara,” a photograph that shows the author as a small-town beauty pageant queen, the only Black contestant), Carter-Jones goes back in time to incise the triumphant yet tarnished moment:

There are so many good poems in Every Sweet Hardness. This review chooses to give the last world to the author’s father. “A Taste” describes the complex mix of desire and shame the author and her family felt about the castoff luxury food given as a “backdoor advantage” by white employers: “…Shrimp. Never more than / five or six. Stuffed heavy with crabmeat […] Kalamata olives purple-black as irises / bloomed on the side of our house in late / spring.”

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Angele Ellis is a Pittsburgh-based writer and editor and the author of four books, including Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems about her Arab American heritage earned a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.  

Copyright 2024 by Angele Ellis