Muscadine

In his debut poetry collection, Muscadine, A. H. Jerriod Avant cultivates the vine of family memory, mourning collective losses while celebrating the sustaining sweetness of human connection. Like the native grape whose “thick skin [that] teeth / pierce breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue,” these poems reveal beauty and nourishment beneath life’s hardest surfaces.

Rooted in the American South, Muscadine balances an intimate awareness of abundance and scarcity, where hunger wounds as often as it delights, and the landscape itself bears witness to both grief and grace. Avant’s richly musical language explores love, conflict, memory, and resilience with extraordinary lyricism and emotional depth.

Throughout the collection, Black Southern voices become vessels of remembrance, preserving family histories while honoring those who have been lost. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger,” the poet writes. “Look / how pops left before we // thought he was done.” Yet even in mourning, hope persists: “Listen, / how the voice of a dead man // can live.”

Both elegy and celebration, Muscadine is a remarkable meditation on memory, inheritance, and survival—a powerful debut that reminds us to carry life’s brief blooms with us, to “Pack me a bag / I can fit in my heart.”