By Javacia Harris Bowser | For The Birmingham Times
Four years ago, Ashley M. Jones was selected as Alabama’s first Black and youngest poet laureate. Four years ago, Jones lost her father, a man she called her hero, suddenly and unexpectedly.
“Lullaby for the Grieving,” Jones’ fourth and most personal poetry collection to date, is set to be released by Hub City Press on September 16, 2025. In her latest work, Jones explores the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to being a Black American in the South.
The collection weaves together poems Jones performed in her role as Poet Laureate with works penned as she struggled to write herself whole again after a devastating loss. Yet, no poem reads as a dirge of despair steeped in sorrow. Some poems read like a celebration of family and love. Others are boldly defiant against racism and systemic oppression. And they are all unapologetically Southern and unabashedly Black.
Jones’ father, Donald Lewis Jones, was a 26-year veteran of the Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service and chief of the Midfield Fire & Rescue Service from 2020 until his death.
The specificity of the poems about her father are what make Jones’ work universal. The grief feels raw and real because the love feels so deep and true.
“I haven’t been myself for three years/ I don’t know who’s walking in my skin,” she writes.
Critical Race Theory
“Lullaby for the Grieving” opens with the poem “What It Really Is,” which Jones describes as “an american acrostic.” An acrostic poem is a poem in which specific letters, usually the first letter of each line, spell out a word or phrase vertically. This one spells out “critical race theory.”
Jones writes: “Cameroon is a whisper in my blood – the ancestry kit tells me/ as it uses DNA to glue me back together. Can it catch/ long strands of lineage shucked and punched to pulp? Somewhere, a clot/rubs its rigid way into my veins. It calls itself america.”
Jones has been praised by the New York Times for her searing work on race. The poems of her new collection grieve the brutality Black people have endured from slavery to the years of Jim Crow to present day, yet hope stands in every stanza.
A Portrait of Harriet
In a series of poems that pay homage to Harriet Tubman, Jones showcases her mastery of rhythm and sound. With its lack of punctuation, the piece titled “HOLYHEADHARRIET” mimics the rhythm of one racing to freedom. Read aloud the piece titled “Harriet, The Locomotive” and the lines sound like a train traveling down railroad tracks “into freedomfreedomfreedomfreedomfreedomfreedom.”
But these poems remind readers that when it comes to the story of the Underground Railroad “the train was made of flesh/the train was made of blood” and though Harriet Tubman is a hero, though she is holy, she is first and foremost human.
I Think of You, Alabama
Throughout her tenure as Alabama’s poet laureate, Jones has written and performed poetry for a number of organizations and events including the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, Alabama Humanities Alliance, The World Games, and the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Many of these pieces show how it is possible to love the places you call home while still grieving all the ways that they fall short.
The poem “Freefriedfowl At The Coon Chicken Inn” will remind longtime fans of Jones’ work of the poem “All Y’all Really From Alabama,” which was featured in the Poem-a-Day series on Poets.org by the Academy of American Poets.
In “Freefriedfowl,” Jones writes: “brother Malcolm told us anything below Canada was dixie—/so here we are at your red open mouth/in salt lake city,/in seattle,/in portland–/ not as hot as alabama, but inferno all the same.”
And yet, in the poem titled “I Think of You, Alabama,” which was commissioned by The World Games, Jones declares: “When I think of love/I think of you, Alabama.”
Poetry Is for Everybody
Along with serving as Alabama’s poet laureate and the associate director of the University Honors Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Jones also is the founding director of Magic City Poetry Festival (MCPF). MCPF’s slogan is “Poetry is for everybody,” and Jones’ work leans into this mantra.
Even if you’re not a lover of literature, even if you can’t name the different poetic devices and forms that Jones masterfully employs in this collection, these poems are for you. You’ll find yourself highlighting lines that you’ll read again and again, not because you don’t understand them but because you do. Because you feel them or perhaps you have even lived them.
On Grief and Love
Through a series of “Grief Interludes” interspersed throughout the collection, Jones not only pays tribute to her father’s memory but also visually shows readers that no matter how busy she has been with the work of being poet laureate, grief has not loosened its grip.
But loss only hurts because first there was love. First there was a father who would “even reach for my adult hand crossing the street,” a father who cried when his daughter received the biggest recognition of her career (before, of course, being appointed poet laureate), a father who tenderly tended to collards in his garden, a father that Jones describes as the “spine of our family.”
Jones writes: “Although we’re unassembled by your death/you build us back. You whisper without breath.”
Near the conclusion of the book, Jones offers a series of several sonnets for her father, closing with “I’ll love you always, Donald Lewis Jones,/my dad, my hero, fire in my bones.”
“Lullaby for the Grieving” by Ashley M. Jones is set for release on September 16. The book is available for pre-order at hubcity.org and Amazon. On Sept. 14 at 2 p.m., Thank You Books will host Jones at the Birmingham Museum of Art for a special ART LIT event. Learn more at thankyoubookshop.com.
