Slack Tongue City, Mackenzie Berry

Mackenzie Berry’s Slack Tongue City is an ode to Berry’s hometown—Louisville, Kentucky. This debut poetry collection acts as a love letter, paying homage while also tracing the joys and dangers of nostalgia for place. Glasses of bourbon in summer, jug bands, disco balls, and homemade pools quenched from the mouth of a garden hose populate the poems with memories and longing. Slack Tongue City says Louisville is the South because it says it is while simultaneously inviting you to join for supper and see what the syrupy, Kentucky heat is all about. Forget what you think you know about this city—or if you know little, then here is the place to see it through the eyes of someone who loves it dearly. These poems will show you what hides behind the rolling hills. Beyond one city or one region, Slack Tongue City also draws the reader through poems that include the rituals of girlhood via a speaker who, even though they may leave, will never fully be removed from their hometown.

“In the breathtaking debut collection Slack Tongue City, Mackenzie Berry remixes the state of Kentucky: it is a state of mind, a state of being, and a state of regional identity where the geographic boundary between rural and urban form this lyricist’s playground. ‘Louisville’s the South because you have to trip your tongue up to say it right,’ writes Berry, her slack tongue making its unique music—peppering her city with spice, grit, and irreverence. Slack Tongue City is an electric hymnal that Berry expertly concocts from fast horses, strong bourbon, jug bands, blood, gutters, riverbeds, and magnolia blossoms. These poems make me smile out loud. I find myself sucking them through my teeth, like good meat. Devour this book. It’s delicious.”
—Shayla Lawson, author of This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope

“In Slack Tongue City, Mackenzie Berry makes the case that Louisville, her hometown, serves as our shadow capital, a sister city to places like New Orleans or St. Louis, communities completely original and trapped between worlds. As vital as the liver or the spleen, and equally unacknowledged or abused, until one is at the edge of catastrophe, Kentucky is central to our American body politic. Like Komunyakaa’s Bogalusa and Levine’s Detroit, Berry masterfully sketches the anatomy of a city. This debut is an invitation, but the keys to this world are carefully hidden.”
–Amaud Jamaul Johnson, author of Imperial Liquor and Red Summer