Description
Poetry. "With PLUNGE, Alice Jones brilliantly and with beautiful tact revives the art of menippean satire. In our disfigured state, she 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 (its nine innings) progresses from haiku to sestina, or the reverse. It goes like this: (a) 5-7-5 haiku; (b) 5-7 line near-tanka (c) 13-14 line near-sonnet in couplets, rhyme not foregrounded (d) single-page 20-line poem (6 x 3 plus 2) (e) sestina. 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. Seen through these formal lenses, Jones departs San Francisco, lunar mouth above Golden Gate; follows Auden through Italian hills; sleeps under the rain in real time; wanders a mythical forest; gets muddy in a political swamp; plunges into a clean blue pool; buries her dead; threads labyrinthine snowy ancestral Ohio; returns across the high sierra; and falls gracefully into seasonal dark. Whether the work finally embodies a global odyssey or remains a set of beautiful slides from the poet's summer vacation, Plunge is breathtaking in scope and impeccable in execution"--John Oliver Simon, Northern California Book Awards Reviewer.
Author Bio
Alice Jones's collections of poetry from Alice James Books are The Knot, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and Isthmus, winner of the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award. Extreme Directions (The fifty four moves of Tai Chi Sword) was published by Omnidawn Press. Books from Apogee Press are GORGEOUS MORNING, PLUNGE, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and VAULT. Poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Verse, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry; Blood and Bone: Poems by Doctors; and Verse and Universe: Poems about Science. 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 in Berkeley and is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA