Books by Jay Bryan
Behold (2026)
Selected Poems (2013)
Carrboro’s 100th Birthday Poetry Anthology (2011)
Haiku for Carroll (1994)
Behold
A Poetic Exploration of Migrant Stories from North Carolina and Florida
Jay Bryan’s new collection of poems is about migrants he met during the summers of 1973 and 1974 on farms across North Carolina and in Belle Glade, Florida. The poems are based on his observations, experiences, and notes taken of conversations, some of them recorded on cassettes. The purpose of this collection is to help the reader see beyond the typical media representations, to appreciate and understand the humanity of these workers and their families despite the conditions under which they live and work, and to increase compassion and respect for them as fellow human beings.
What They Are Saying
Jay Bryan hears voices. When he gets the spirit, he speaks in tongues. The voices are of migrant farmworkers Jay knew as a young man in the fields and camps of North Carolina and Florida. The tongues are those voices merged, blended, and mingled through his poet’s ear, then rendered for the rest of us into haunting poems of sadness, hardship and resilience. If you love the blues, you will want to read these poems.
~ Alex Harris
Emeritus Professor, Duke University
Jay Bryan’s BEHOLD is a timely body of work, but more than its timeliness, the work in this book compels us not to look away. Not to look away from our history, not to look away from our present. The poems in BEHOLD have a cinematic quality that doesn’t always resolve where expected, but still touches the reader. In musical terms, many of these poems end in dominant chords, Bryan challenges us to complete the score.
~ Fred Joiner
Carrboro Poet Laureate, 2019-2022
Academy of American Poets Laureate, 2019
Jay Bryan’s poems present an orchestra of voices singing the stories we need to hear. Celebrating the wisdom, persistence, and endurance of migrant workers in the American South, these necessary poems hold narratives and lives like armfuls of precious melons.
~ Gideon Young
Poet and educator
More About the Book
Behold consists of four sections:
The Camps explores the anonymity of workers in fields from North Carolina’s east coast to the Piedmont from the perspective of people driving by, farmers for whom migrants work, and each other.
Belle Glade, Florida, was the home of many migrants who left during the summer to travel the eastern seaboard as far as Maine to pick and pack. The poems in this section speak of those who remained behind.
The Appendix contains interviews with two Black Americans who spoke of injustice, poverty, crime, unemployment, and community through the lens of their religious beliefs. Included are notes typed in the 1970s from shadowing a doctor who treats migrant workers.
The Epilogue describes the poet’s journey: high school, college, working at Duke, and being inspired by Dr. Robert Coles, a Harvard child psychiatrist who authored books about migrant workers and their families, all leading up to the poet’s own work in the fields and among migrant communities.
Selected Poems
“Jay Bryan’s poems have a special feeling about them – filled to bursting with the stuff of real life, they are both deeply personal yet simultaneously universal … Many indeed are the gifts of the spirit to be found here ….”
Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls and Oral History
“Jay Bryan knows a secret, and the poems in Selected Poems set the compass needle cleanly and kindly ‘always pointing home.’ Home is the secret — certainly the home of family living and gone, honored pets, revered objects and spaces which he observes with a tender and celebratory verve .… The poems move from the kitchen in the farmyard, the sick bed to the courtroom, the marriage bed to a grandfather’s joyful pride, with equal compassion and awe ….”
Jeffrey Beam, Poet, author of The Broken Flower and Gospel Earth
Carrboro’s 100th Birthday Anthology
In 1996, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen established Carrboro Day. According to the philosophy adopted by the Board, “This day would be modeled after the small-town homecomings and parades once common the United States, and festivals in Europe which were started for religious purposes but evolved into community celebrations. Local music, games, dancing, food, poetry, stories, groups, talent, and humor… offer Carrboro citizens a day to forget themselves, to reach out to others, and to create a memory of renewal and fun that would be sustaining when difficult issues face them or the whole town.”
Poetry was intentionally included as part of the oral and written traditions to be celebrated, and every Carrboro Day since 1996 has included readings by Carrboro poets and other poets from near and far. This anthology, edited by Jay, includes poems read by Carrboro poets on this occasion from 1996 to 2011.
In 2001 the Board of Aldermen approved an official position of Poet Laureate, and the anthology also contains poems by the current and four past poets laureate.
Haiku for Carroll
These poems, created in loving response to a life crisis, reveal a labor of the spirit. At their center is the courage, faith, and travail of Carroll Kyser, as she struggles for her life. Beside her as helpmate, as spiritual witness is Jay, her husband.
Jay began to write a poem a day for Carroll as a way to support, to share, to express, and to understand the situation—the labor she and he, too, were undergoing. Some of the poems are true haiku with a fixed three-line structure of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Some are prayers, some are simply themselves.
