Jones has a lyrical mind and meanders through memory and imagination in his poems, fusing them and making them work to surprise the reader with intriguing and challenging images. The collection builds beautifully, each section nurturing the others, and all of it displays Jones’s fine talent—keenly intelligent, human, and compassionate. His quick, splendid sense of humor surprises the reader, playing one image off another that is seemingly unrelated to the first, yet achieving a sense of rightness in poem after poem.

Poet Rodney Jones was born in Alabama and educated at the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published widely in leading magazines, in The Oxford Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and in eight editions of The Best American Poetry. His books include: Imaginary Logic; Salvation Blues: 100 Poems, 1985-2005, which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Elegy for the Southern Drawl, a Pulitzer finalist; Things That Happen Once, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist; and Transparent Gestures, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Jean Stein Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A professor and distinguished scholar emeritus at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.