Awards
Winner of the 2007 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Synopses & Reviews
This expansive and accessible collection presents one hundred choicepoems, including twenty-four pieces only published in this book. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Rodney Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, "the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered."
Review
"Jones evokes both the old and the new South in memorable lines. In poems that are smart and fun and honest to their core, he dispels tired myths and stereotypes, creating entirely new ones to our delight." Library Journal
Review
"Jones' poems report on a life spent detailing the sacred and the profane, and together they create a solid, highly recommended volume." Booklist
Review
"Reading [Rodney Jones'] poems [is] a continuously liberating experience. This is work that really matters." Carl Dennis, 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry
Synopsis
Spanning two decades of the author's literary work, a collection of one hundred poems includes twenty-four all-new poems and offers a poetic vision of the tension between history and modernity and a vision of his own Alabama childhood. Reprint.
Synopsis
Rodney Jones has been called "the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry" (Southern Review) and one of the nation's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces.
Synopsis
Rodney Jones has long been praised for his masterly storytelling and the bold southern voice he brings to his poetry. Salvation Blues celebrates the range and evolution of his work over a twenty-year period with one hundred selected poems -- including twenty-four bold pieces published only in this collection.
About the Author
Rodney Jones was born in northern Alabama and is now a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. A former Guggenheim fellow, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1990. His most recent of six other collections, Elegy for the Southern Drawl, received the Southeastern Booksellers Association Award for poetry in 1999. Jones's poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and other periodicals, and in five annual editions of The Best American Poetry.