Aroma Truce

The poems in Terrell Jamal Terry’s Aroma Truce announce their arrival with language that is both instinctual and inevitable, “the same way as weather” the speaker tells us in the opening poem. Each poem creates its own stunningly perfect world, yet somehow each of these worlds manages to open up and say something about the one we inhabit. Through this continual unfolding, this is a book for our time, a book of both “frail worry” alongside “stubborn hope” a book that offers desire alongside what one might hope for others: “I would like goodness & to be good.”

-Adam Clay,An auspicious and powerful debut, never satisfied with the seam between the spiritual and the sensual, the anecdotal and the merely true. “Don’t guess

Terry admonishes-indeed, every line of these poems feels hard-won from the guesswork of experience and language. “Do I go too far / with this?” Terry asks; “That’s not everything. / Animals & rain. My body, it stings.”

-G.C. Waldrep