Glitter Road by January O’Neil

January O’Neil’s Glitter Road (2024) in some ways continues the lyrical arc that began in her two previous collections, Misery Islands (2014) and its follow-up Rewilding (2018). But her latest collection is distinguished by something else: poems that deftly merge form and content, and the tangible and profound effects that relocating from Massachusetts to Mississippi has had on the author and her writing. After living in this complicated and mystifying state for one year, it is clear that the potency of O’Neil’s poems has matured, and her expressive powers, personal insights, and cultural commentary have strengthened as well. All of this is to marvelous effect and great pleasure for the reader.

An opening poem, “Rebel Rebel,” immediately commands readers’ attention. Printed horizontally across two pages, the poem resembles a monument and requires readers to reorient their approach to the page. O’Neil interrogates the endurance of Confederate sympathies in communities of the Deep South: My poems brought me to Oxford, Mississippi, a.k.a. the Velvet Ditch: a place you can fall into, get comfortable among confederate rebels.

O’Neil is deliberate with each usage of confederate, even devoting one couplet of the poem to its full definition. This mixed use is helpful for understanding how O’Neil portrays Oxford, a small college town with outsized antebellum spirit home to the University of Mississippi, as she considers the import of its racial legacy:

A Confederate statue guarded the campus entrance for 114 years. A monument
to grief. To the Lost Cause. Our pain matters less than dead white rebels.
Rebel Rags. Rebel Appliance. Rebel Bookstore. Rebel Wine and Spirits. Rebel
Paintball. Rebel Fever. Rebel Fitness. Rebel Well. Rebel Radio. Rebel Rebel.

O’Neil aims to showcase how, over a century, the spirit of this monument has overshadowed the entire community and oppressed its few Black residents. Responding to the wave of social unrest in the summer of 2020 that resulted in Confederate monuments across the country being dismantled and removed, O’Neil recognizes that racial prejudice and Confederate sympathies can be ingrained in the land itself:

That Confederate statue? Relocated to a Civil War cemetery overlooking Ole Miss’s
football field. Athletes demanded a barrier. It looms over practicing young Rebels. […]
Magnolia trees splay green and wide in January. So few Black folk downtown,
but the Blues are everywhere. My ancestors walk with me: ghosts and rebels.

A Confederate statue guarded the campus entrance for 114 years. A monument
to grief. To the Lost Cause. Our pain matters less than dead white rebels.

O’Neil’s moving interest in public monuments and memorials also finds an outlet in recent commemorations to the legacy of Emmett Till. But in Mississippi the inherent risk of private retaliation against these memorial efforts is ever-present, as O’Neil observes in her poem “Three white Ole Miss students use guns to vandalize a memorial to lynching victim Emmett Till,” a title copied verbatim from a USA Today news article that appeared in July 2019.

The poem begins with an image, a description of the photograph the three college students took of themselves at the sign they just vandalized:

They pose their bodies as if they’ve just bagged
their first 10-point buck. One holds a shotgun,
another squats below the shot-up sign,
a third stands with an AR-15.
Three faces smiling, hoisting guns
in front of a bullet-ridden marker:
This is the site where Till’s body
was removed from the river.

O’Neil focuses our attention on the photograph’s implied yet unseen juxtapositions: the presence of violence without a victim to receive it, the grotesque mutilation of a memorial to a person’s spiritual being, and the audacity of self-indictment in an act of racial and social transgression. This is an old story, O’Neil writes, a Southern Gothic. To deny this boy’s life and then deny the marker that says he lived breaks me every time.

The malevolent stare that escapes the photograph is enough to deeply rattle O’Neil: The camera captures the night’s dark cover … the momentary flash illuminating their shit-eating grins and the gun barrels’ glint—lifetimes of getting away with it.

Although the three students were leniently punished for this crime, it is the larger resonances evoked by those final words that get to the heart of O’Neil’s anger and disappointment at the state of things in Mississippi.

The ugliness of the state does not get the final word in her collection, though. Mississippi remains attractively enigmatic for O’Neil, and one of her enduring and recurring symbols for contemplation is the mighty river itself.

Her poem, “The River Remembers,” fuses form and content in its loosely defined yet wandering presentation on the page. The river’s opacity serves as a parallel for the past and future she longs to experience and to know but cannot fully embrace:

I can’t read the River, can’t see my hand
when it plunges elbow-deep
to feel the cool against
the Mississippi heat—
hot as a dog’s mouth.

Channeling her enslaved ancestors through her body’s immersion in the river allows O’Neil to connect across time through the medium of space: We stop here in an oxbow, gumbo mud sticks to our feet. […] The slaves—sold down the river—hid here, hid in caves, fled to the Twin Cities and Canada, their fate at the mercy of the river’s next rise. This description evokes O’Neil’s complex feelings of duality toward the state of Mississippi and her time there, the growth and experiences it provided but also the hatred and malice that it has nurtured in the past and into the present. All of this making a deep reflection on the river itself an appropriate channel for her conflicted feelings:

Here’s the nadir of our suffering,
which started in one place to end in another.
Here’s where flow and marvel and history converge.
This harmjoy. This beautiful sadness.

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Chase Browning is a writer from eastern Virginia. He holds an MA in English from the University of Mississippi and a BA in English and philosophy from the University of Virginia. He lives in Chicago, IL, and is working on his first novel.