Poetry. In A PERFECT TIME, Richard Jones invokes the essential joy, suffering, and spiritual awakening of the attentive life. Jones develops rhythms of natural conversation and a relaxed tone, adding narrative and a sharp eye for detail, to produce a poetry rich with parable-like, aphoristic wisdom. Whether coming home to and his house burglarized, weeping over a nineteenth-century novel while riding a train through the Italian countryside, or simply cooking tomato soup in a yellow pot, he writes from a calm interior in deceptively simple, elegant language. Jones orders moments of mundane experience to reveal uncommon perceptio9n, going beneath the superficial to explore daily epiphanies that might otherwise be overlooked. His is a strange, beautiful and fabulous world.

Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA

Richard Jones is the author of several books of poems, including THE CORRECT SPELLING AND EXACT MEANING (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), APROPOS OF NOTHING (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), THE STONE IT LIVES ON (Adastra Press, 2000), A PERFECT TIME (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), and AT LAST WE ENTER PARADISE (Copper Canyon Press, 1991). Anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems and Billy Collins's Poetry 180, his poems have been featured on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and The Writer's Almanac. He is a professor of English and the director of Creative Writing at DePaul University and the founding editor of the literary magazine Poetry East.