Glitter Road - CavanKerry Press February 2024 - 978-1-960327-01-7
Rewilding - CavanKerry Press 2018 - 978-1933880686
Misery Islands - CavanKerry Press 2014 - 978-1933880464
Underlife -CavanKerry Press 2009 - 978-1933880167
“O’Neil can be heartbreakingly frank, but she can also be wry, moving from the horror of Emmett Till’s murder to the smooth sounds of Tina Turner, from dragonflies to astrophysics. ‘Being a Black woman in America is a lesson on being,’ she writes. ‘Caretakers since the diaspora, we show up and show out, / deliver a nation.’”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“In a series of poems that center on Emmett Till, the Black 14-year-old boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman, O’Neil considers what happens when certain stories aren’t told, when dust blows off a field of collective forgetting. Three iterations of the Till memorial in Glendora, MS, had been shot, stolen, tossed in the river, ‘refusing us the comfort of leaving/ the past in the past.’ The past is not the past, these poems impress; it’s right here with us, whispering, clawing, singing, making itself known in our bodies.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
“January Gill O’Neil is a poet you can trust. With every book, every poem, every stanza, she writes with such grace, insight, and clarity, delineating the music, moments, and moods of her life as a mother, a divorcee, a single woman that one feels, while reading, uplifted, inspired, and even rewilded. She is a poet who touches the heart within the heart, the muse within the music, the magic within the ordinary. She is, in short, what most poets can only aspire to be—beautiful and true.”
—Nin Andrews