Black Jelly is chicken skin, the back of a man’s neck, bones, bulge, empty beds, and God. It is a collection of poems by Melanie Maria Goodreaux with photographs by Nikki Johnson being published by Fly By Night Press, a subsidiary of Gathering of the Tribes.
Black Jelly presents a roaming prodigal woman tossed from a traditional sense of home who wrestles with fitting into the tidy demands of womanhood. Goodreaux is both celebratory and pained by the struggle – giving a womanist’ lens with an honest and inward female dialogue on body, bulge, singleness, childlessness, and a cavalcade of characters that carry her through the long arc of life from kitchens to nightclubs to the realities of love, relationship, and eroticism. Black Jelly is memory-specific while offering striking commentary on the “formlessness” of being a woman. It is a reflective and relatable work that explores the messiness of tremendous sadness while also celebrating cultural roots, spiritualism, love, lust, freedom, imperfection, and forgiveness.
Black Jelly is the first solo book of poetry by Melanie Maria Goodreaux merged with personal photos and select photography of Nikki Johnson. Melanie Maria’s work is raw, messy, musical, honest, and emotionally rich while leaving behind all sentimentality. Nikki Johnson’s photographic style presents compelling people surrounded by personal objects while mastering visions of ‘melancholy and mystery.’
Both artists bask in African-American eccentricities while mixing emblems of southern roots, religiosity, sex, death, and transformation. The two bring their southern roots to the work.
Both women moved to New York City, lived in the East Village, and met Fly By Night Publisher, the legendary Steve Cannon of A Gathering of the Tribes, called the “Father of the Lower East Side Arts movement” by the New York Times. Steve introduced the two, and history was made. Nikki Johnson has been a documentarian of poet and playwright Melanie Maria Goodreaux ever since, representing 20 years of New York City living, from the East Village to Harlem – with all the art and malaise in between presented in Black Jelly.
by Melanie Maria Goodreaux (Author), Nikki Johnson (Photographer), Diane Sullivan and Donald Eggert (Designer)
Melanie Maria Goodreaux is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, actor, and director-dramatist from New Orleans, Louisiana, living, writing, and creating theater in New York City. Her plays are surreal, stylistic, poetic, racial, unconventional, and many times blend genres for dramatic effect. Douglas Turner Ward of the original Negro Ensemble Theater Co, calls her work, “a cornucopia of imaginative theatricality, written with enormous energy and poetic sensibility.”
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