Patricia Spears Jones – författare

Dedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, The Beloved Community sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us.

In her fifth poetry collection, The Beloved Community, 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. 

From the Atlanta Child Murders to the murder of Nia Wilson, The Beloved Community 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, The Beloved Community speaks with spark and urgency.

"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.