Rodney Jones teaches in the Warren Wilson Low Residency MFA Program and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the Harper Lee Award. His new book, Village Prodigies, which combines techniques of fiction and poetry, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the spring of 2017.
Poetry
July/Aug 2020
I Live I Live I Live
The night after the last infusion I dream of stealing an airplane, a single-engine, yellow Piper Cub, and I should tell you right now before I forget, it is a […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2020
About a Quarter Pound of Bologna
Our butcher was not fond of measure — good at it, but not fond of it — brandishing what technique he had taken from his father with deft slices through pink balloons […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2020
In Never Land
The mine heals. The black widow crawls away From the sleeve of my father’s coveralls. The beaten woman retrieves her maiden name. Permission of the deepest sort — freedom From tasks, from […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2016
Homecoming
2003, 1950 One place is as good as another to be born and return after years, like Odysseus to Ithaka or mildew to a rotting plank. How Sunday it all […]
Poetry
Summer 2011
The Previous Tenants
1 The couple who built our house had great plansfor this lot where they would live out their days:he in dedicated husbandry, priming a gardenwith sludge from the sewage plant, […]
Poetry
Summer 2011
The Art of Heaven
In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. Not deep depression. The nice Hell of suburbs. Speed […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Olympiad
Between time and place came this vivid consciousness of things unalterable that some, the lucky or talented, might make out of the materials at hand in such a way that […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
The Attitude
We who have towed the burden share a kinship we ditchdiggers and box toters we hammerers and assemblers no matter if we work now as architects or engineers if we […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
Not See Again
Long I partied hearty with Hogdoo and weird Harold, One of the hippies waiting the orbit of the strobing joint, Talking sidemen on the liner notes of albums And exotic […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
Elegy for the Southern Drawl
It is all dying out now in a voice asking, “Where you from? How ya’ll folks doing?” On the blank verse of the forklift man, From way off down there […]
Poetry
Summer 1989
Meditation at Home
A sampler of country in the margin between subdivisions—Dog-wallows in sedge where we walked a chapel silence That day a doe and two fawns leapt up and bolted south Toward […]
Poetry
Summer 1989
Meeting Bobby
Not one for worship, I waited anyway In the corridor under the auditorium And watched him approaching from a far door, Younger and slighter than in photographs, And dwindling then […]
Poetry
Summer 1989
Serious Partying
The little hits of psychopharmaceutical bliss the street kids still call purple microdots were delivered in plain Ziploc sandwich bags and went three hits for seven dollars. One would bring […]
Poetry
Summer 1989
A Blasphemy
A girl attacked me once with a number 2 Eagle pencil for a whiny lisping impression of a radio preacher she must have loved more than sophistication or peace, for […]
Poetry
Summer 1989
Dangers
From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs, Happy to linger in shallows while others jack-knifed from cliffs, wrong To exact perfection from a sad piece […]