“A Jennifer Bartell poem unwinds like “a Black tea-stained river water… on its way to the Atlantic.” A Jennifer Bartell poem houses the bucolic gospel of a Bluefield griot and the abstract blues of our present world. Lucille Clifton appears with tiny packages of light. A stone grows gills and lives at the bottom of a woman-built lake. You find the poet in the mouth of the fish. Jennifer Bartell makes fabulous poems. Traveling Mercy is a fabulous debut.” –Terrance Hayes, MacArthur Genius and author of American Sonnets for my Past & Future Assassin
“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, National Book Award Winner and author of Head Off & Split
Jennifer Bartell Boykin is the Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia. She teaches at Spring Valley High School, where she was named the 2019-2020 Teacher of the Year. 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 debut book of poetry, Traveling Mercy, will be released in November 2023 under the name Jennifer Bartell. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian, Callaloo, pluck!, As/Us, The Raleigh Review, kinfolks: a journal of black expression, 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 is pursuing a Master of Library and Information Science at USC to become a school librarian. You can reach her online at www.jenniferbartellpoet.com.
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.
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