TJ Jarrett is a senior editor of Tupelo Quarterly and a business intelligence consultant for HealthTrust in Brentwood, Tennessee. She is the author of one volume of poetry, Ain’t No Grave, and has published poems in a number of journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, VQR, and West Branch.

Other poems by TJ Jarrett in Verse Daily:
December 17, 2013:   "Drinking with Mephistopheles" "When the mountains said come, he left...."

Books by TJ Jarrett:

Other poems on the web by TJ Jarrett:
"At the Repast"
Four poems
"How to Speak to the Dead"
"Meridian, MS 1964: At The Solstice, The World is Flooded With Light"
Two poems
Two poems
"1920: In Duluth, Minnesota"
"Astronauts"
"Meridian, MS 1958: My Grandmother Meditates on the Miracles of the Christ"

TJ Jarrett's Website.

TJ Jarrett on Twitter.

About Zion:

"In Zion, TJ Jarrett maps a new language for reconciling racial and cultural tensions that few poets would have the courage to approach, much less subvert and transform into a conversation of equals. She has a compelling story, she has the ear to make the language sing, the alertness to metaphor to make it interesting, and the drama to make it stick. Just as significant, she brings a tone that neutralizes all acids. In humanizing the often demonized Mississippi white supremacist politician Theodore Bilbo, she facilitates an unforgettable dialogue of generation, of gender, of race. Zion is a work of high art and difficult forgiveness, and TJ Jarrett is a name that we should remember."
—Rodney Jones

"One simply must relish the superb light and a captured sense of darkness as avenues of lyric survival, the exemplary wealth of both human suffering and wise knowing in these poems that make reading Zion as much a warding off of spirits as it is a celebration of language and remembrance."
—Major Jackson

"TJ Jarrett’s Zion is a fearless, gorgeous, and necessary book. With personas that shift from the self, to the dead, to the proudly racist former governor of Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, these lyric investigations take on a familial and regional legacy and wait for the reckoning to come. Jarrett’s poems are both an act of remembrance and a search for forgiveness, that place where ‘the world comes all at once like the Red Sea regaining its contours after miracle.’ Even though the dead are everywhere and the body is called animal, called waiting room, called to the flooding river, this book gives me hope that there’s still mercy to be had. It may be all we have left to give each other."
—Traci Brimhall