REVIEW FOR GIFTED

Oh fuck. Okay. Let’s begin.

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This is not a normal review. As evidenced by the use of the word fuck in the first line. This is not your three-sentence Goodreads summary with a tidy star rating and an audible sigh. This is a scream. This is an act of communal bloodletting. This is a holy gasp into the void that shouts: Maia Brown-Jackson did not come to play. She came to gut you with grace and then kiss the scar from nape to nipple.

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Her new collection, Gifted, follows the devastating brilliance of her previous book, And My Blood Sang, but it does not walk the same path. Where Blood Sang crackled with wounded lyricism and grief held tenderly in cupped hands, Gifted is a fire in the bloodstream, myth exploding mid-sentence. The voice is older, angrier, funnier, much more sure of itself—even when it’s unsure of its world. If Blood Sang mourned, Gifted rages. If the first book traced the golden cracks in the vessel, this one hurls it at the wall just to see what else can be built from the shards. Not everything can be fixed as it is; sometimes it must be wholly changed into something new.

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Gifted is not a poetry book. It’s a war cry wrapped delicately in silk. It’s an entire mythology freshly dug up from under your ribcage. It’s a broken mirror and a lit match and the softest fucking whisper of hope you have ever felt brushing your cheek just when you were sure you couldn’t go on. It’s where the personal meets with the entirety of human history, and they fight for their rightful place in each other.

 

And it is, I will say this with the fervour of someone absolutely losing it in a back pew of some velvet-lit queer church, one of the most extraordinary poetry collections I have ever read. Period. Full stop. Send the chorus home. Burn the scripts. Replace the book on the altar. We’ve got some screaming to do.

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Let’s get this said early: I am not a woman. I do not know what it means to be born into the eternal mythology of sacrifice so intimately sketched in this book—to be raised for martyrdom, to be told that survival is selfish, that softness is a duty and rage is forbidden unless it’s dressed up in service. But Gifted made me feel like I’d been handed the training manual to a brutal secret society I’d always half-sensed in the air around me. This book is for everyone, but make no mistake: this book is a spell for every woman clawing her way back to life. It is sacred text. As both refusal & re-becoming.

And Maia fucking delivers.

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The structure of the book is mythic. Operatic. But also deeply, brilliantly human. We have our speaker—a hero not by choice, but by birthright. A woman not given a name, but a role. She is chorus-bound, death-haunted, and caught in a feedback loop of duty and decay. She talks to Death. She talks to herself. She talks to the goddamn Chorus, who interrupt, question, snark, console. We’re in Greek tragedy territory here, but it’s not dusty. It’s riotously alive. The chorus bickers. Death flirts. And the speaker? She bleeds. She questions. She wants.

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From the very first poem, I Met Death At An Unspecified Time, we’re already underwater. The voice is sharp and spiralling.

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Fuck. I stopped breathing. Already.

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But what makes Gifted so powerful is that Maia doesn’t stop at pain. She builds from it. She questions it. She lights it on fire and dances in the fire, smoke, and ash.

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This isn’t poetry that sits & wallows in the nuanced darknesses of trauma. This is poetry that charges it. That fights back. That bares its teeth, not just in vengeance but in exhausted, electric clarity.

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Because rage here isn’t purely chaos. It’s choreography. It’s ritual. It’s the drumbeat beneath the language, pulsing through every line. Maia shows us what it means to hold rage with reverence. Not as an uncontained fury, but as sacred fuel. The kind of rage that comes when the world has expected your quiet for too long. The kind of rage that turns martyrdom into metamorphosis.

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This rage is intimate. It’s not broadcast from a pulpit. It’s whispered into your shoulder in the middle of the night, trembling and breathless: I can’t do this anymore. And then it stands anyway. That’s what makes it so holy.

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And Gifted isn’t only about rage. It’s about the miracle of surviving rage. Of crawling out of the fire not just burned—but still capable of joy. Still more than capable of saying yes again, and meaning it differently each time.

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That’s one of the real fucking triumphs of this collection. It takes something as simple, nuanced, and loaded as the word yes and explodes it into every possible emotional frequency. Yes is compliance. Yes is survival. Yes is consent. Yes is surrender. Yes is desire. Yes is a door opening, or a scream, or a whispered plea into the chest of someone who finally, finally stays.

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And no? Oh, Maia knows what no means too. No is a fucking sword. No is power. No is life.

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She cauterises the wounds of black and white. She performs vivisection on the grey area in between. She packs it with fireworks of defiance, and quite rightly — BOOM! — the whole thing is illuminated in scorching technicolour for everyone to see clearly. A minefield of yeses and nos. Our entire human history an oscillation between the intent of those two words. Loaded. Cocked. And boom.

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This book doesn’t settle for binaries. It fractures them, bleeds them dry, and then somehow grows something new but also achingly ancient from the wound. We are wounded by the shrapnel of potential. And from there? We grow. We learn. We hope again. And we say yes. We say no. And we survive. Saved. Freed. Gifted.

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Let’s talk style. Think: Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red meets Savannah Brown’s Closer Baby Closer. Add the self-sacrificial blaze of Sylvia Plath, the philosophical clarity of Maggie Nelson, the bite and bravado of Kim Addonizio, and the deep tissue love-ache of Richard Siken. Stir in just a touch of fanfictional drama and you get close to the scale of Gifted.

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But Maia is not derivative. She’s making her own genre here.

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It’s speculative confessional mythopoetics as praxis. It’s ritualised resistance literature. It’s bisexual goth liturgical erotica in the body of a girl who would rather live than die this time, thanks.

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Her chorus reminds me of Beckett’s Godot by way of a punk musical rock opera. Her metaphors—star iron in the blood, the body as explosive, the chorus as judgmental ghosts and hype squad and doomed ancestors—feel like living things. Like if you turned the page too fast, they’d climb out and tap you defiantly on the shoulder.

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And then—just when you think it’s done.

Just when you think she’s going to go full martyr again.

Just when the fire is licking at her ankles and Death is cradling her face.

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She chooses life.

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This is not just poetry. This is blueprint. This is how you rewrite the ending.

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This book made me weep & ache in my chest. It made me smile with a renewed hope in my heart. It made me want to put on eyeliner and scream at the moon and write my friends long, awkward love letters telling them to choose themselves. It made me want to keep fucking going.

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If you have ever felt like your softness was a weakness, if you have ever confused kindness with compliance, if you have ever burned yourself up for someone else and still been asked for more, then Gifted is your book.

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And if you are still alive?

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Maia Brown-Jackson sees you. She wrote you into the myth. You all get to voice a line here. And she handed you the pen with which to write your own truth.

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Now rewrite your own ending.

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The mantra of this entire book feels like the leaping off point from two words: “and yet…”

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TL;DR:

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READ. THIS. FUCKING. BOOK.

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One day, hopefully soon, we’re going to have dismantled patriarchy, and when we want to knock through, build a conservatory, and sit & bask in the warm, reassuring glow of the sun, this is the book that will teach us all not only how, but also why.

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