Alabama - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Rodney Jones (Paperback)

About the Book

"In the wake of a cancer diagnosis, the death of his parents, and the election of Donald Trump, Pulitzer finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Rodney Jones began writing Alabama. Encompassing labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry-if it is his darkest book, his playfulness and lyrical panache transmute the heartbreak. A new sweetness and intimacy pervades the work, a sense of relaxing into his voice, and a vision as clear as top-shelf moonshine, rooted in love, grounded in an abiding awareness of mortality of both person and place. On one level, the book takes a hard look at globalization as negotiated by a single rural enclave long vulnerable to the whims of multinational capitalism. At the same time, there's an embrace, often elegiac, of what fastens us to place, to the land and the people who work it. All shaped by Jones's deep empathy and feeling for wiry and strong character, rendered in compelling narratives as local as they are universal, and permeated with his wonderfully sardonic, enduring humor. Alabama offers readers language played masterly by the poet who Dan Chiasson, writing in Poetry, called "the best accessible poet writing in America.""--

Book Synopsis

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.

Review Quotes

"If there is a way to hold on, to recover some part of what's lost, and grasp--for even a fleeting moment--the ineffable, this marvelous book is it."--Natasha Trethewey

"Jones has found an inevitable, pared-down, utterly original way of telling his story in the context of the culture he comes from. This is a lovely book, for its humor as well as its compassion."--Alan Williamson

"Jones is a trustworthy storyteller precisely because he can't help but stay emotionally attached to what he often intellectually disbelieves. Alabama is a great book by a great poet."--Alan Shapiro

"No one can match Jones for the range of unflinching sensibility or the miraculous capacity to wrench blessing out of dailiness and degradation and active harm."--Linda Gregerson

"Rodney Jones is perhaps the supreme example we have of the southern human person speaking in American poetry."--Kate Daniels

About the Author

One of the most honored poets of his generation, Rodney Jones has been praised for his narrative and lyrical skills, as well as the empathy, intelligence, accessibility, and original humor of his work. He is the author of eleven poetry books, including Salvation Blues, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Elegy for the Southern Drawl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016, he became the second poet to be inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.