Rodney Jones
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Information about the author.
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Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005
Rodney Jones
Rodney Jones has been called “the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry” (Southern Review). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four new pieces. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. There is no subject that he will not touch, and in his detailed vision of his Alabama childhood, he ennobles a misunderstood community. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”Find it:
Rodney Jones
On receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his third book, Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones was hailed as “a brand-new world-class poet.” This collection of poems, rich in irony, sensuousness, and pleasure, reveals his robust, humorous, earthy, and cerebral view of reality and his exploration of all regions and sensibilities of American life.Find it:
Rodney Jones
A bawdy, witty revelation by an award-winning poet who celebrates the soul of the South in jest and in elegy. Exulting in the drawl of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones’s poems play out the life cycle of the young southern white male, from high school football games to first debauchery, from ignorance to self-understanding. Other poems speak of laying sewer pipe, of crows and sex, ink and raccoons, penises and perpetual motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in it. Jones dedicates other poems to poetry readings and English departments, to William Matthews, to Isaac Bashevis Singer, and to William Carlos Williams. His poems burst with wit, robust experience, and earthy intelligence. Awarded the AWP writing prize by Elizabeth Bishop and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Rodney Jones is one of the most original poets in America.Find it:
Things That Happen Once: New Poems
Rodney Jones
Things That Happen Once, Jones’s fifth volume, may well be his finest yet, combining currents of southern evangelism, contemporary sophistication, and passionate moral engagement. Its forty-one poems display an exciting power of language and open up new visions of inheritance and parenthood, sexuality and change. In doing so, these poems release energy that American poets and readers of poetry will eagerly welcome.Find it:
