Michal 'MJ' Jones’ debut Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling — an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: “We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust.” The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, & bringing back “rainbow soap colors”. It is a book of passing — as, through, and on. Hop on in.

"Hood Vacations is a massive triumph of lyric, of narrative brilliance, of imagery. But, above all, this book is generously transportative. The page becomes a portal through which a place emerges, and then becomes as familiar as your own home."
—Hanif Abdurraqib

"Hood Vacations is a tender debut that takes us on a journey of Black childhood in the suburbs, the awakening of political consciousness, and the self-determination of young adulthood. It is a narrator that goes from child to parent, and the attendant worries and joys that come from being responsible for growing life. Jones deploys a variety of received and innovative poetic forms that engage in a formal shaping and reshaping of content to produce different registers of praise, recollection, and discernment. Like an afternoon of listening to the smooth jazz channel, we move through a set of biological and social relationships that imbricate the narrator in a web of becoming."
—Arisa White