Poetry. "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. Because Jones has focused on the names of these moves as much as on the moves themselves, she's always beginning with language, but a physical language, and a language that's an integral part of a system of mental discipline. This gives these brief poems a sharp accuracy and enormous, floating centers. 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 Swensen

Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA

Alice Jones's books from Alice James Books are THE KNOT, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and ISTHMUS, winner of the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award. EXTREME DIRECTIONS was published by Omnidawn. GORGEOUS MOURNING and PLUNGE were published by Apogee Press. Poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Boston Review and VOLT, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry of 1994; Blood and Bone: Poems by Doctors; Verse and Universe: Poems About Science.

Her awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts, the First Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Robert H. Winner and Lyric Poetry Awards from the Poetry Society of America. She practices psychoanalysis in Berkeley and is a supervising and training analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

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