— Winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize —

With candor and insight, American Graphic confronts personal and cultural pasts. Juxtaposing historical documents—recipes from the first cookbook published by a Black woman in the States, reward posters for people fleeing enslavement—with intimate moments from the present, the book's magic is to bend time so we see that the past’s rivers flow through us into the future. Spare yet lyrical in its language, American Graphic is a concentrate of feeling and vision.

Praise for American Graphic

In the slaughterhouse of the nation, the history, the language, JoAnne McFarland writes: “The feather inside me won’t be quiet.” And of the winter: “It could change in a heartbeat, it will change as our hearts are beating.” American Graphic is a field of marks and feelings quite impossible to describe. Minimalist yet dense, a thicket of sparse reckoning out of which beauty is pulled to the surface with muscle and voice, color and hand. Dynamic and exacting, McFarland’s is a brilliant, singular vision. American Graphic is an astonishing work. —aracelis girmay

In American Graphic, JoAnne McFarland brilliantly reassembles the ingredients of this nation’s violent history, finding in the witness of the past profound creative energies of survival. “Every woman has a tongue / Her appetite can be a death sentence,” McFarland writes, yet in this astonishing book about hunger and loss, it is the power of making—in a recipe proudly shared or in the quilt patterns that encoded the paths of the Underground Railroad—that emerges as antidote to a poisonous past. Reproducing found documents and her own heartbreaking collage works, American Graphic brings home the extraordinary powers of word and image assembled in complex, gorgeous dialogue. This book is astounding. In the face of violent unmaking, McFarland’s verbal and visual miracles await. —Elisabeth Frost

JoAnne McFarland’s American Graphic serves us a mesmerizing potion of personal history peppered with documentation of national cruelty and lifted with homage to Black ingenuity and resilience. Festooned with Adinkra signposts and latticed threadwork, McFarland masterfully weaves a call-and-response seam between past and present. Ingredients provided here are ambitious craft, persistent attention to memory, a sensual, fetter-free eros, and a reader willing to emancipate the way they understand poetry. —Tyehimba Jess

When JoAnne McFarland writes “the feather inside me won’t be quiet,” she invites us to see this unfold in her imaginative use of poems, captions, and printed matter from a mid-19th century America that some in this country are eager to suppress. Part artist’s book, part poet’s notebook, McFarland weaves together stories where the tender meets the terrifying, where recipes from the first cookbook by a Black woman press up against advertisements seeking to recover runaway slaves, with their matter-of-fact text, bold fonts and illustrations. American Graphic is a remarkable hybrid by a gifted maker, who, in her poem “The Plate,” shares the utensils and what she has swallowed to find: “the birthplace of my imagination.” —Elaine Sexton

With a deft verbal touch and vivid imagery, JoAnne McFarland continues and deepens her exploration of intimacy and history in her latest collection, American Graphic. Never reductive, with a deceptive simplicity that recalls Emily Dickinson, these poems and images invite the reader into a world both richly satisfying and devastating. A slice of orange, a blackberry, a cluster of cherries, embroidered and beaded in jewel tones, recipes from a mid-19th century cookbook (the first by a Black American), legal notices calling for the capture of runaway slaves, quilt patterns said to help guide them to freedom, and collaged dresses in the spirit of another great NYC artist, Joseph Cornell: all these punctuate poems that speak eloquently of the inner life and the complicated intersection of personal history and History. With its gorgeous interplay of image and word, McFarland affirms the power of creativity and beauty. American Graphic, spanning time and space and identity so powerfully, gladdens the reader.
—Andrea Carter Brown

From American Graphic

• A sample from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 18

• A review of American Graphic at Frontier Poetry