Alice Jones's books, The Knot, which won the Beatrice
Hawley Award, and Isthmus, recipient of the Jane
Kenyon Chapbook Award, are both published by Alice James Books.
Anatomy was published by Bullnettle Press. She has
been awarded The Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society
of America and fellowships by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference
and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is co-editor
of Apogee Press.
Praise for Extreme Directions
“The motion of the writer is so practiced that word
and sign and motion and idea become one... her poems often
cut two ways and divide the opposites, pointing to something
beyond themselves.”
--Helen Ruggieri, Rain Taxi
“Each Tai Chi movement is an opening into the poem;
each movement also creates the poem as a sweeping gesture,
an underlying eroticism of the present…”
--Christopher Arigo, Pleiades
"A compact book... easily returned to like a daily
practice... Alice
Jones' book evocatively renders the physical moment permanent
in
words."
--Arielle Greenberg, HOW2
"A new constellation is the gesture of an eye. Extreme
Directions is a beautiful sequence of such gestures--across
air, across earth. Alice Jones is a poet to bring us to our
senses, and there we
find the shining task of Worlds"
--Donald Revell
"Based on the classical moves of Tai Chi sword, these
poems have all their distilled grace, but
cover much more distance, leaping from marine life to geometry
to intimacy with ease."
--Cole Swenson
"...A mutability is somehow made palpable on the page
with delicate and intricate care, then vanquished altogether
with an almost reckless wildness and speed as the poems make
their own (our own) discoveries."
--Gillian Conoley
"...These poems are, truly, a Tai Chi for the imagination."
--David St. John
From Extreme Directions (page 1)
Beginning form
Wide globe
round arms
want latitude
improbable regions
east’s sword dance
you
untranslatable
into
me
we’re a mouth
kiss the diameter
make time
go long
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