Five Points South: Poems from an Alabama Pilgrimage

As a child first introduced to the horrors of race relations in the so-called United States, I held contempt for the South. As a race scholar, the Malcolmian position that the Canadian border demarcates the South informs my current analysis. Nelson deliberately challenges traditional narratives of whiteness to uncover the South, an Alabama that is much more than the violence she eloquently describes in the preface. A poetic autoethnography, this beautiful collection of poems is a stirring synthesis of contemporary thought, historical truth, and memory. Nelson's brilliant piece reads like a series of short stories traversing whiteness to explore, reposition, denounce, reclaim, and celebrate the dynamic splendor and terror found in a single space. Words restore like those DANDELIONS! [reference to "Pulling Dandelions"]

-Dr. Kalvin DaRonne Harvell, Coordinator of Black Male & QUEENS Focus Group, Founder & Chair of the Black Male Retention & Success, and the Excellence of the Black Woman Conferences (Henry Ford College), & Diversity Scholar-National Center for Institutional Diversity (University of Michigan)

The exile's return to the South, going back in time by way of going back to place, is an established trope, a journey we know how to take. The trees get greener, the air thicker, the cadences slower, and memories crowd around, demanding attention. Nancy Owen Nelson's account of a road trip through the Alabama of her youth, and of her family's history, is a deeply introspective addition to this literature. Nelson asks the hard questions of herself, and of her earlier selves: who was she and why did she make the decisions she did? How did her own whiteness function in a segregated Alabama? What does she owe history? With images carved from long knowledge of the state, and searching language that pulls us forward into confrontations with personal and cultural history, these poems lodge in the psyche, refusing to be forgotten.

-Jennifer Horne, Former Alabama Poet Laureate, author of Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed Light

The last word of Nancy Owen Nelson's Five Points South is "home," a hard-earned keynote in an intense, sometimes dissonant probing of where she is from. Poems tracing a two-week journey from Alabama's southern border to its northern limit and beyond are in fact a plunge into the poet's and the region's past-food, family, college, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the Civil War, childhood innocence, broken marriages and love affairs. The poems are direct, gritty, nuanced, persistent, making a dark and celebratory music of connections too deep to ignore. Attentive readers will find in these accessible and richly detailed poems a mirror of their own struggles to define what kind of place they call home.

-Harry Moore, author of Bearing the Farm Away and Broken and Blended: Love's Alchemy