YOU WERE NOT BORN TO BURN ALONE
A Review of Maia Brown-Jackson’s Gifted
Oh fuck. Okay. Let’s begin.
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.
If you’d like to read my review of her previous collection, And My Blood Sang:
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.
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.
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.
“I can still shatter—
despite my training and my fortitude
I am made up of the same soft flesh as them, and that they do seem to purposefully ignore— but until I do I will continue to plant my feet and stand tall where I always have:
between them and the danger.”
Excerpt from Where I Stand
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.
From the very first poem, I Met Death At An Unspecified Time, we’re already underwater. The voice is sharp and spiralling. We get:
“I said yes, / and yes, / and yes again, / again, / always; / it became too much.”
The repetition. The exhaustion. The performance of permission. And then, the turn:
“Then there was nothing left but that seed of darkness. / That little piece of Death.”
Fuck. I stopped breathing there. Already.
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.
In the poem Saint Jude, she writes:
“All my life I’ve been told, / yourturntofight / (for what?) / andpush / (against everything) / and by now Saint Jude’s got nothing on me.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And no? Oh, Maia knows what no means too. No is a fucking sword. No is power. No is life.
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.
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.
“That’s not me.
Because if you touch me,
you’ll get 100 volts direct to the heart,
you’ll find that I’m a dirty bomb,
radioactive,
brilliantly yellow
TOXIC!”
Excerpt from BOOM!
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.
But Maia is not derivative. She’s making her own genre here.
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.
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.
“Yes, it is almost always girls this happens to.
No, it is not every girl.
How would society continue then?
In this world, girl simply means one who will never have
the opportunity to survive long as woman.”
Excerpt from It Was Never Mine To Offer
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.
She chooses life.
“I think— / I think I don’t want this life any longer.”
“I think I’d rather resist that so-called fate / and whatever god anyone might believe in / so I can have a life where I get to love you.”
And then?
“I saved my own life— / now it’s just a matter of what I saved it for.”
That line. That fucking line.
I want to tattoo it on my sternum. I want to whisper it to every woman I love. I want to carve it into the walls of every hospital, every school, every goddamn church.
This is not just poetry. This is blueprint. This is how you rewrite the ending.
“Can’t there be just one story
where the hero makes it to the end,
gets to go home again?
No one heard my question.
At least, no one gave me an answer.
Yes, I can say now with confidence,
to the girls who may or may not
choose to be heroes,
yes.”
Excerpt from The Hero Saves Herself
And so we come full circle.
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.
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.
And if you are still alive?
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.
Now rewrite your own ending.
The mantra of this entire book feels like the leaping off point from two words: “and yet…”
TL;DR:
READ. THIS. FUCKING. BOOK.
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.
There are so many incredible poetry books coming out this year from poets I know & treasure, so you can expect to hear me frequently shouting from the rooftops this coming year. If you aren’t able to buy the books, please do share the reviews far & wide so they may find their people.
Poet Chaotique.xx