The Beloved Community

Patricia Spears Jones

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 wordplay 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 a tool 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

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ISBN: 9781556596667

Format: Paperback

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Morning Glory

Sunlight softens helicopters hover
skies above Brooklyn Presidential
Visit, murder investigation, matters little
Noise in the skies, noise on the ground

You should prune the morning glories
I tell my elderly neighbor.
She refuses. She likes the way the vine has
Curled around her fence with a ferocity
That cannot be so easily cut back. I get that.

Wildness is rare on a Brooklyn city block,
Old roses return late May as if to say, ha! you
Think we do not know the season? Squirrels
Roam the bricks of buildings, while the gleaners
Fight with raccoons for the spoils of left-out trash.

Huge green leaves for plants with names
Unknown to me sparkle on mornings bright
And dead tree leaves demand constant sweeping away.

The tabby is big, old, and tired—too many kittens
Not enough food—these are ungenerous cat lovers.

Neighbors greet each other and shake their heads
At the young men and women, mostly, but not
all Whitefolk running running—or their faces
Drowning in a pool of handheld devices.

You almost wish they smoked or cursed
Had personality—but they run and run and run
Thus, the joy of this vibrant morning-glory vine
Rooted in her garden’s disarray—happily dominating.

Oh, morning glory—purple, green
Leaves plump as Italian cookies, blossom
your hearty display for all to see, hold your
vine’s haven on Macon Street. Only
Winter, harsh winter will take your vines
Back to the ground your wildness calmed.

About the Author

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist. She is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. Her work is anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song; Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; and BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, …

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Reviews

“These poems could easily sag under the weight of their grief, yet Jones’ short, sharp-talking lines, staccato sentences, and light-on-feet litanies propel the reader down the paths she has paved. ” —Arden Levine, Under a Warm Green Linden

“Spears Jones’s imagistic internationalist, docu-political sentences resemble conversation but stop you in your tracks.”—Diane Mehta, Electric Lit

“As she moves through space and place, Spears Jones tangles with trauma both specific and abstracted, large-scale and local, with an American ‘ecology of fear.’ . . . But for all the trauma, love more than rage wins out: this is a collection about kinship and the forms it takes, even after death, as well as about Spears Jones’s belief in the power of poetry to articulate and embody such kinship.” —Rona Cran, Brooklyn Rail