Under the Arbored Moon, by Mignon Ariel King

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Under the Arbored Moon is a safe place to land for a Black woman writer in the aftermath of personal and world disaster. Looking back does not mean being stuck in a global plague quagmire. There is gratitude for life, the chance to finish a project twenty-plus years in the making, and the ability to look at the very distant past, be grateful for the father whose face she has, “Often his temperament./As a woman, however, I’ve learned to sift both/parents’ teachings through screens of passive/resistance to direct or passive aggression...”

The collection is one of hope and moving forward, but King often suppresses a good laugh at the hypocrisies and inequities of social systems that made a chance temporary home—in a semi-co-op with five roommates over the summer of 2020—feel like a protective bubble checking the imbalances that left the most vulnerable populations in the USA without basics such as a steady roof and home. Alone at last, she pulls together the manuscript that bridges the gap between pandemic survival writings and the death of her nuclear family with her mother’s passing a decade earlier. This is not a pity party; it’s enjoyment and appreciation for sweet moments in life, including the conviviality of middle-aged women going out on the town back in the ‘90s and the simple pleasure of socializing with her unlikely roommates at night, in their private pod under a thicket of leaves and moonlight twenty years later.

Mignon Ariel King was born in Boston, Massachusetts and has never left her home time zone. An alumna of Simmons University, she worked for a decade as a database assistant by day and an adjunct English instructor by night. King is the publisher of Tell-Tale Chapbooks and Hidden Charm Press. Her publications are listed on her blog, Making Books Rock.