Skip to main content
[search]

Rodney Jones

Rodney Jones is the author of seven collections, including Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin) and Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Houghton Mifflin). His new and selected Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005 will appear from Houghton Mifflin in the spring of 2006. Among his many honors, Jones was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award. Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

Author

Courtship

By Rodney Jones

Summer 2005 | Poetry

How much medication human mating requires in the United States, in the twenty-first century, gallons of beer and rum, kilos of hash and marijuana, all to dispel the counsel of parents, and priests, and mirrors, so every Bev and Bill can function as h [...]

0 Comments

Dry Socket

By Rodney Jones

Winter 1985

I turn over on my left side, so the blood can drain off the   bad nerve—200 pound head, hair festering like a turnip in its dark soil, nails curling and   sharpening for the feather and scale, for the rubbery jugular inside the   throat [...]

0 Comments

Thoreau

By Rodney Jones

Winter 1985

It is when I work on the old Volvo, lying on my back among the sockets, wrenches, nuts, and bolts, with the asphalt grinding the skin over my shoulder blades, and with the cold grease dripping onto my eyeglasses, that I think of Thoreau on his mornin [...]

0 Comments