Jackson’s humor has a tendency to surprise the reader as well. “Autumn in Chestnut Falls” is placed in between “Storm on Display,” a poem which paints the female superhero — “the marvelous / wonder of a woman genetically confused” (p. 54) — as a traveling circus freak and “Home from Work, I Face My Newborn Mutant Sun,” a heartwrenching account of a father seeing his child who is literally as delicate as glass. In this somber placement, “Autumn in Chestnut Falls” holds some needed lightheartedness, even if it is grimly-crafted humor. The first few lines immediately hook the reader:

This scenario could as easily be a comic strip box as it could be a metaphor for the boy’s deviant behavior. The situation, if possible, becomes even more bizarre when

The humor in “Autumn in Chestnut Falls” comes from the subject, of course, but also from the inclusion of such colloquial phrases like “nobody’s business” and “that boy was trouble,” whose familiarity provide contrast to the notion of tentacles coming out of a football uniform.

The phrase “that boy was trouble” takes on new meaning when presented in a racial context. “How to Get Lynched on the Job” addresses the subject of being black at work and the fear that perpetuates. Stuart appears in this poem, too, when he whispers “in Nicole’s ear that he wanted to taste / her. She got the hell away, // he just laughed” (p. 59). The speaker goes on to say that “It was the first time / I worried for him.” He is sure that Stuart should have been sued for harassment because she was white. Chillingly, he recalls a famous case sparked by racism:

He refers, of course to case of Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Jackson’s concentration on race in much of the book is very deliberate. In his short essay on Missing You, Metropolis, he writes “Regardless of my content, my poetry stems from, and reflects, the perspective of being black in America.”