Imaginary Logic - by Rodney Jones (Paperback)

About the Book

Middle age, masculinity, competition, religion, football, and the art of poetry itself spin together into powerful ironies in some of the best poems Jones has created so far: 'I had a dream, ' one begins, 'of harnessing and exacting irrevocable power over others ... in the cleat-pocked, dried dirt of a practice field."

Book Synopsis

"It's Jones's age-defying distinction to have mobilized a moral intelligence that's sufficiently vast to contain multitudes."--Washington Post Book World

Imaginary Logic is a brilliantly expansive, deeply meditative, and at times wildly imaginative collection of poems that combines Rodney Jones's distinctive storytelling ability, sharp social intelligence, and keen powers of observation in a book that is wistful, satiric, audacious, and remorseless. "The Art of Heaven" opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Jones's readers have come to rely on: "In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things aren't quite paradise."
Jones, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of America's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Imaginary Logic is the most eloquent expression yet of his rigorous mind, scrupulous eye, and capacious heart.

"[Jones'] poems are a work of hands, and hands-on. His rich lyric sentences register experience at the full and thus at its high moment of complexity. Like most of the important poets, he's a lapsed pastoralist attempting to restore--no, save--the fallen."--Stanley Plumly

Review Quotes

"Middle age, masculinity, competition, religion, football, and the art of poetry itself spin together into powerful ironies in some of the best poems Jones has created so far: 'I had a dream, ' one begins, 'of harnessing and exacting irrevocable power over others... in the cleat-pocked, dried dirt of a practice field.'" --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Rodney Jones, born in Alabama, is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. Salvation Blues received the 2006 Kingsley Tufts Award.