Books by Alice Jones
Vault
Apogee Press (2020)
Vault melds the movements of a mind, of an athlete leaping gracefully through the air, of a tongue at play among constellations of vowels and consonants. These poems make use of discontinuity and collage, written in long-lined couplets that recollect a heartbeat’s systole and diastole, sound and silence, the ever-present pulse of being and non-being.
“With a beautifully careful eye on the finest details, Alice Jones discovers delicate connections among surprisingly diverse things. Parthenon marbles, small flames on the Ganges, Mount Tamalpais, and sparking synapses all take part in her exquisitely choreographed paean to existence. Her precise attention embraces everything, whether frightening or joyous, tragic or triumphant, always supported by a love of the world that is apparent in every line.” —Cole Swensen
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Plunge
Apogee Press (2012)
“With Plunge, Alice Jones brilliantly and with beautiful tact finds somehow surviving vivid emblems of our moral nature and brings them to the fore. En route, she proves willing to dismantle anything—including her own voice and her own distinctive music—that might distract us from the ruined truth of our Republic. These are poems of spiritual renovation—hard-won, hard-edged and, against all odds, tender to a fault.” —Donald Revell
“Alice Jones ‘plunges’ into the sensory world through crystalline lenses of form. Each of the book’s nine poems progresses from haiku to sestina, or the reverse. Each of the nine poems is a series of variations on a theme, translations from small to large and back, expanding and contracting like breath, systole and diastole, the accordion’s huff and wheeze. Plunge is breathtaking in scope and impeccable in execution.”
—John Oliver Simon, Northern California Book Awards Reviewer
Gorgeous Mourning
Apogee Press (2004)
Selections won the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America
“The blithe fluency of Gorgeous Mourning—the greetings it makes, and the intricate chances it takes—is like a legacy made good. The pun of the title gorges, but lightly like the poems themselves, on the strange pieties the language plays on. It is part of Jones’s artfulness in these dazzling poems to be at once utterly coherent and plausible, and wholly taken in by where the words are going. When Emerson wrote “whim” on the lintel of his study door he was reminding himself that our prosperity is in the waifs and strays of language. In Gorgeous Mourning Jones is recovering this prosperity.” —Adam Phillips
“There are times, & this would seem to be one of them, when a poet so transcends the roots of whichever tradition they chose, that any reader has to acknowledge that they’ve arrived as a major writer whatever their aesthetic stripe.” —Ron Silliman
“Gorgeous Mourning is an extended run of verbal mischief. but it is a serious wordplay, wordplay with a purpose, whimsy on a mission. Jones fearlessly follows language wherever it takes her. she means to end up a little nearer the heart of the world, a little closer to what it means to be alive on earth.” —Ann Stapleton
Read a poem from Gorgeous Mourning
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Extreme Directions
The fifty four moves of Tai Chi Sword
Omnidawn (2002)
“A new constellation is the gesture of an eye. Extreme Directions is a beautiful sequence of such gestures—across air, across earth. Alice Jones is a poet to bring us to our senses, and there we find the shining task of worlds.” —Donald Revell
“Based on the classical moves of the Tai Chi sword, these poems have all their distilled grace, but cover much more distance, leaping from marine life to geometry to intimacy with ease… They’re held breaths, glances over precipices onto sweeping views. They’re another version of those marvelous paper flowers that go from little pill to gorgeous blossom when dropped in water, but here the water is the ocean of the mind.” —Cole Swenson
“Alice Jones’s remarkable new collection of poems slices through the ambiguous shadows of experience to reveal the brilliance and clarity beneath the surfaces of our lives. Each gesture here is an incision in consciousness, an aperture through which the other side of thought is made visible. These poems are, truly, Tai Chi for the imagination.” —David St. John
“Composed of subtle humor and dark wit, these are finely chiseled poems of gesture caught in space and let suddenly and lovingly go. A mutability is somehow made palpable on the page with delicate and intricate care, then vanquished altogether with an almost reckless wildness and speed as the poems make their own (our own) discoveries.” —Gillian Conoley
Read a poem from Extreme Directions
Available from Omnidawn and Amazon.com
Isthmus
Alice James Books (2000)
Winner of The Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award
Alice Jones’s Isthmus, a book-length love poem, explores the space where improbables meet, the arc of possibility for two lovers who have come together from opposite sides of the Pacific. All the tenderness and tensions of marriage are here in that sandy stretch between “the land masses of you and me.”
Available from Alice James Books and Amazon.com
The Knot
Alice James Books (1992)
Winner of The Beatrice Hawley Award
“The Knot is an extraordinary combination of lyricism, mythmaking, and an informed use of the language of medicine. We have had William Carlos Williams, the doctor-poet—now here is a woman, skilled at the same kind(s) of work, and with her own forceful voice.” —Alicia Ostriker
“Poets and psychoanalysts have, in very different ways, to become masters of metaphor. Alice Jones is both a poet and psychoanalyst. Her wonderful poems exemplify Freud’s statement, ‘The ego is first and foremost a body-ego,’ and illustrate the importance of the body (one’s own and one’s parents’) to the mind at every stage of life.” —Leonard Shengold, M. D.
Available from Alice James Books and Amazon
