Plucked

In her debut chapbook, Miracle Thornton offers an imaginative portrait of black girlhood. In an effort to understand how we come to know ourselves, the poems interrogate fraught intimate and communal spaces. From the pews of a Baptist church or shushing through the halls of a home in the night, Thornton’s poems are sensitive to the at once suffocating and wonderful complexities of love, the body, and home. Inspired in part by the Aesop fable “A Jackdaw and Peacock Feathers,” the figure of a dejected black bird haunts the page. The jackdaw acts as a mirror or a window which the speaker runs against and away from at turning points in her life. Tender and gilded, plucked thrums with a delicate force.