{"title":"Patricia Spears Jones","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"beloved-community-book-patricia-spears-jones-9781556596667","title":"The Beloved Community","description":"\u003cb\u003eDedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, \u003ci\u003eThe Beloved Community\u003c\/i\u003e sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn her fifth poetry collection, \u003ci\u003eThe Beloved Community\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFrom the Atlanta Child Murders to the murder of Nia Wilson, \u003ci\u003eThe Beloved Community\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Beloved Community\u003c\/i\u003e speaks with spark and urgency.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49748427276561,"sku":"NGR9781556596667","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50380928975121,"sku":"CIN1556596669VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51036770763025,"sku":"NIN9781556596667","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52670432280849,"sku":"NLS9781556596667","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52815862497553,"sku":"CIN1556596669G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53262931788049,"sku":"GOR014842976","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1556596669.jpg?v=1750829453"},{"product_id":"weather-that-kills-book-patricia-spears-jones-9781566890298","title":"The Weather That Kills","description":"\u003cb\u003eEvocative imagery that leaps from the page with the force of gunfire.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"In her first collection, Jones illuminates 'the secret joy beneath grim turbulence' that propels these poems into her readers' hearts and minds. Exploring 'the daily material that makes a life being lived' with a fluent intelligence, she connects the personal to political, self to other, then to now. Rooted in the complexity of the American experience, she traces the presence of the human spirit in art, history, geography, politics and popular culture with riveting shifts of scale and focus. 'The Perfect Lipstick' moves from a consideration of Christopher Columbus to the slave trade and then leaps assuredly to her 'favorite shade of lipstick, Sherry Velour,' whose name suggests 'Black men in sequined dresses and the click of new words\/ in the new world where the most dangerous of dreams\/ come true.' In 'Glad All Over,' the poet, an African American, recounts her childhood experience of the civil rights struggle in the South during the '60s in a quiet, truthful telling that gives tribute to 'our family's ordinary courage' and creates a compelling, defining image of a pivotal time.\" \u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50381654327569,"sku":"CIN1566890292G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52684139594001,"sku":"NLS9781566890298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52815103918353,"sku":"CIN1566890292VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1566890292.jpg?v=1751374809"},{"product_id":"femme-du-monde-book-patricia-spears-jones-9781882688319","title":"Femme Du Monde","description":"These are poems of positions and relationships, shifting angles on received wisdom or cultural cliche, fiercely signifying in an age of raging information and vicious exploitation. For Patricia Spears Jones, subjectivity is a challenge and a bugaboo. \"\"Who wants to know your stuff unless Subject (Black and Female) is violated and\/or perseveres against all odds?\"\" asks Spears Jones. She tackles grand issues like racism and sexism, but with an intimate poet's eye to details, moments, miracles, pains, and the wildness of the moon and stillness of water. History and the visual serve as analogs for this collection, tying together a diverse group of poems written about the paintings and statuary in Paris; mansions in Virginia; the commes de garcons store in Soho; or a chocolate shop's window in Munich. This is a textured landscape of troubles and terrors and temptations galore. A world that would look familiar to Dante, whose observations about winners and losers haunts these poems. \"\"We know more than we care to admit and live lives of such great challenge that where humor and awe finds us is where poetry begins,\"\" Spears Jones writes. \"\"Luck is a harsh thing to hang one's life on. Better to be curious. Get up. Walk out the door and face what the world offers with humor, with courage, with joy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50393584959761,"sku":"CIN1882688317G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52629861859601,"sku":"NIN9781882688319","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1882688317.jpg?v=1763481154"},{"product_id":"painkiller-book-patricia-spears-jones-9781882688401","title":"Painkiller","description":"Painkiller is the final book in a trilogy of collections that started with The Weather That Kills (1995), followed by Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha, 1996). Of these three collections, the poems in Painkiller are the most emotional and intimate, and yet they are also the most universal as they look at the consequences of love found and lost; passions unleashed; terror from human conduct and the awesome power of natural disaster. While this is a collection that responds in part to 9-11, many poems were written prior to that event, to the injury to the city and our psychic well-being. Those portents and that injury set the collection’s tone. Painkiller explores one poet’s vision of the city, her friends, her lover, her losses and connects those individual perceptions to a suffering world in turmoil. In the poem \"In Like Paradise\/Out Like the Blues\", a poem from The Weather That Kills, Patricia Spears Jones wrote: \"Each of turns to the hunger of stars\/and wipes the crumbs from our mouths.\" Painkiller is about that feast.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50393596723473,"sku":"CIN1882688406VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52629862383889,"sku":"NIN9781882688401","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1882688406.jpg?v=1763481375"},{"product_id":"lucent-fire-new-and-selected-poems-book-patricia-spears-jones-9781935210696","title":"A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems","description":"\"Vibrant with the intensity of blues singers.\"-Feminist Bookstore News  \"Patricia Spears Jones is cosmopolitan blues goddess alive on the wind stream of transnational homemade intimate gossip. Her poems are a highly effective antidote to living in a country where caring seems to have been placed on the Endangered Activities list.\"-David Rivard  \"Patricia Spears Jones reminds me of those wisecracking, foolproof women in the old films she so lovingly dissects-the ones whose deadsure, replenishing humor and never-fail good sense causes the audience to sit up and clap.\"-Cyrus Cassells  \"She has given us a world where music and brains are allowed to co-exist with instinct, where the lyric and the literal may dwell without eyeing the other with suspicion.\"-Cornelius Eady  From \"The Perfect Lipstick\":  It is why I appreciate my favorite shade of lipstick: Sherry Velour. Sounds like the name of a drag queen from the early seventies. One of those strapping Black men who had enough of playing macho, put their feet in five-inch heels and made saints of Dinah Washington, Rita Hayworth and a very young Nina Simone. So, on goes this lipstick. Pretty for parties. Fatal for festivals. Sherry Velour and her hot discoveries: light above the fog, a toy ship. Black men in sequined dresses and the click of new words in the new world where the most dangerous of dreams come true. Patricia Spears Jones was named by Essence.com as one of its \"40 Poets [They] Love\" in 2010.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51054187741457,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054190461201,"sku":"NIN9781935210696","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52587404198161,"sku":"NLS9781935210696","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53567648694545,"sku":"CIN1935210696G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1935210696.jpg?v=1759833529"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-patricia-spears-jones.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}