Hoops: Poems

Lush reflections on ordinary lives, displaying “formal talents and [Jackson’s] capacity for expanding the lyric potential of narrative” (Rain Taxi).

In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marvels of ordinary lives: a grandfather gardens in a tenement backyard; a teacher unconsciously renames her black students after French painters. The substance of Jackson's art is the representation of American citizens whose heroic endurance makes them remarkable and transcendent.