Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005

I can't often read contemporary poetry anymore. I used to, but it got too hip for itself, too much insider lit. Rodney Jones' work never does that. These are deep and thoughtful poems, and more often than not, funnier than hell. The reader is never shut out of Rodney's world, s/he is invited time and time again to be a part of it.

Salvation Blues collects 100 of Rodney Jones's best poems, culling material from Kingdom of the Instant, Elegy for the Southern Drawl (his best book), Things That Happen Once, Transparent Gestures, Apocalyptic Narrative, and The Unborn. (Only poems from his first book, The Story They Told Us of Light, are omitted), and adding what would have amounted to an entire book's worth of new poems. There is no poet working today who is better with narrative, and no poet who can wring so much lyric intensity out of narrative material. This book is a good showcase of Jones's material, and a great place for a new reader to begin reading him. For longtime readers, the new poems are reason enough to want to own the book.

Salvation Blues is testament to twenty years of some of the most devilish, intelligent, and humane letters you can find in contemporary poetry. Rodney Jones writes with an honest voice driven by both condemnation and joy for the world's shortcomings and marvels. This is a book to send to anyone who doesn't believe poetry can change the way you think and feel about the world around you.