Poems
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Woke Ghazal
It was “Black cool” before it was cool. Before it was “woke,”
it was funky and fly, fleek and bae. Before it was FUBU, it was woke.
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Woman Swallowed by a Python in Her Cornfield
Inside every woman is a snake. Some think I'm a hoax or an oddity, rarer than winning Powerball or being struck by lightning. Everything has a form, even doubt.
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Sunnyside
—for Joseph O. Legaspi
And when you whispered under your mask, I don’t think I can stand these two young lovers, bright as the low winter sun shining through the dingy subway car windows, I knew what you meant:
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Five Poems!
Running into My Ex-OBGYN at Whole Foods
Lightning Bug Ode
Em Dash Ode
The Bone Player, William Sidney Mount (American, 1807–1868) Oil on canvas, 1856
The Viewing
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Manifesto
You can’t eat your cake and have it, too, says my boyfriend
and Ted Kaczynski, turning clichés into bombs. My boyfriend
who is not the Unabomber loves me from 1,300 miles away.
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Be Mine
We valentined our way through February
and at the center pulsed my holiday
birthday: red hearts, red cake, red letters
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Someday I'll Love January O'Neil
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Every Love Story Starts with Want
Still, I am celebrating myself,
the single Pringle,
with a glass of Cava and Wellfleet oysters on the way.
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Us
We meet in cities where we have no connections,
makes us feel anonymous, even to ourselves.
On this weekend, Daylight Savings gives back
one sweet hour.
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The Map
Blues, greens, oranges, and reds shade
the paths across a vintage map of The Mississippi,
a birthday gift. Backswamps and braided streams
loop the river channels thousands-of-years old,
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“What's Love Got to Do with It?"
And when Tina sings I’ve been taking on
a new direction directly to camera,
defiant, her lips glazed a tumultuous red,
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Cartwheel
And when no one is looking
I will spin my Ferris-wheel-body
into a patch of late autumn leaves,
pretend I am a kaleidoscope
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Driving Through Mississippi After the Capitol Hill Riot
And when that country dog blocked the car
snarling, put his body in front of the front tire,
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Rowan Oak
Under beaded lights strung from cedar to cedar,
we dine on low-country oysters: briny and delicate,
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The River Remembers
Here the water is silt brown,
stretches mile-wide,
flat as a washed-out conveyor belt,
an unhemmed rumble strip.
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Three white Ole Miss students use guns to vandalize a memorial to lynching victim Emmett Till
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,
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Begin Again
listen / this food is blessed by your presence / When we break bread / together / perhaps the world begins here
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Elation
We gaze at the stretched-out stalks—
Etiolation, you say, pointing skyward,
but all I hear is elation.
Glitter Road by January Gill O'Neil - full highlight by Creative Collective
Glitter Road video poem - Digital Ribbon Cutting by Creative Collective
January Gill O'Neil, P.O.P
“Hoodie” from Thacker Mountain Radio
Press
January O'Neil joins Radio Boston to discuss her new poetry collection "Glitter Road."
RHINO Poetry: Review of Glitter Road by Rosanna Young Oh
Many poems in January Gill O’Neil’s fourth collection, “Glitter Road,” seem like graves that the poet has excavated. These poems inhabit literal places, traveling from the speaker’s home to the classroom to Mississippi. They also resurrect the dead, such as Emmet Till, as well as personal and political memories of heartbreak and loss. However, the book’s epigraph – “Joy is an act of resistance,” a quote by the poet Toi Derricotte – serves as a thesis for these poems, for they marvel at a fallen world as much as they lament it.
Nothing You Expect: Joseph O. Legaspi Interviews January Gill O’Neil
JANUARY GILL O’NEIL and JOSEPH O. LEGASPI have been friends for almost three decades, since the mid-90s, when they met at orientation in the beat-up lounge of New York University’s creative writing program. The two simply hit it off, bonded over brie, and shared poetics, both starry-eyed on their first venture into New York City.
Dante’s Old South Radio - Interview (Spotify)
April 2024 - Dante’s Old South
January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press.
Lit Hub: See the cover for January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Glitter Road, January Gill O’Neil’s latest poetry collection, which will be published by CanvanKerry Press in February.
Boston Globe: Massachusetts Poetry Festival Brings community Together in Person after Long Hiatus.
“Sometimes people believe poetry is depressing and full of loneliness, or aloneness,” O’Neil says. “But I do think poetry is about connection. My poetry always leans towards joy.”
The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by The Native Plant Society of New Jersey
Episode 3: Poet January Gill O’Neil and Landscape designer Edwina von Gal
Renowned North Shore poets, Greenbelt offer free outdoor poetry workshop
O’Neil said, “The marsh is one of those spaces, like so many, that’s really worth preserving. So I’m happy to do something that brings a little bit of attention to the beauty of the landscape and the natural aspect of our common spaces.”
Cape Ann is home to many poets, both past and present, and in that spirit of creative thinking, the Gloucester Writers Center presents the final event in its Winter Reading Series. Poet and professor January Gill O’Neil, who served as a longtime executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, will give a reading on Thursday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the Cultural Center at Rocky Neck at 6 Wonson St., Gloucester.