The Beloved Community

By: Patricia Spears Jones

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Paperback | 9 November 2023

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Paperback
80 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.8 x 15.2 x 1

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Dedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, The Beloved Community sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us.

In her fifth poetry collection, The Beloved Community, Jackson Poetry Prize winner Patricia Spears Jones interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal. From lyric to elegy, far-reaching poems use word play and metaphor to create richly textured landscapes in search of community. As we traverse delis, laundromats, and the Brooklyn block where morning glories grow "leaves plump as Italian cookies," poems about poverty, art, and community, become poems about location--always the city is alive and breathing. Later, the collection widens its view, leaving Brooklyn to visit the consequences of violence across America.

From the Atlanta Child Murders to the murder of Nia Wilson, The Beloved Community is fearless in its rage and hope as it explores what disrupts-- oppression, injustice, loss, grief, and a fraught sense of the erotic. Largely dedicated to musicians, artists, and fellow poets, Jones acknowledges art as tools for both care and resistance, recognizing that "voice is our greatest magic." Imbued with history, laced with tenderness, and channeling a long tradition of the blues in African American poetics, The Beloved Community speaks with spark and urgency.

Industry Reviews

Praise for The Beloved Community

"These poems could easily sag under the weight of their grief, yet Jones' short, sharp-talking lines, staccato sentences, and light-on-feet litanies propel the reader down the paths she has paved. "-Arden Levine, Under a Warm Green Linden

"As she moves through space and place, Spears Jones tangles with trauma both specific and abstracted, large-scale and local, with an American 'ecology of fear.' . . . But for all the trauma, love more than rage wins out: this is a collection about kinship and the forms it takes, even after death, as well as about Spears Jones's belief in the power of poetry to articulate and embody such kinship."-Rona Cran, Brooklyn Rail

"Spears Jones's imagistic internationalist, docu-political sentences resemble conversation but stop you in your tracks."-Diane Mehta, Electric Lit

Praise for Patricia Spears Jones

"Jones's poems, written during the past two decades, vibrate with a noticeable hunger and irresistible energy, unashamed to explore the nuances of intimacy via the looming specters of pop culture and history." -Publishers Weekly

"Poems like stars in a constellation: each glowing point connects in a pattern charting lives full of love and disappointment, injustice and defeat, joy and resilience."-Library Journal

"Patricia Spears Jones's poems are like homecomings-in her pages the sights and smells, rhythms and caresses of many lives waft up from Memphis and Manhattan...." -Thulani Davis

"A world where music and brains are allowed to co-exist with instinct, where the lyrics and the literal may dwell without eyeing the other with suspicion." -Cornelius Eady

"Jones returns to her source, a steady presence of desire, pleasure (fun!), and beauty as literally lifesaving." -BOMB Magazine

"No matter what the risk, Jones is not afraid to touch." -Arkansas Review

"A lyric collection that is engaging, honest, and with sprinkles of delightful humor." -Tribes

"These are the careful insights of a woman who has experienced and noticed more tragic scenes." -Black Issues Book Review

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