Alabama

Poems

Rodney Jones, Dave Smith

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807180556
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I Live I Live I Live
• “All human time is simultaneous . . .”
• “Maurice Merleau Ponty writes . . .”
• He Said She’d Have to Walk Six Miles to Draw Them Water
• “Small houses about a quarter of a mile apart . . .”
• “The shame of provenance . . .”
• The Death of Joshua Vinzant
• When Everything Is Nothing
• “Here I am in a cottonfield . . .”
• “A dirt road . . .”
• The Worst Thing Ever Done to Me
• “My father often tells . . .”
• Two Heroes of Love
• “Wherever I go in Alabama . . .”
• “I am timid like James Hardin . . .”
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• “1976 I am teaching . . .”
• A Hippie in Alabama
• In Neverland
• “The trees are in their autumn beauty . . .”
• June 16, 2016
• “Why does Fairview matter?
• Identifying with Stars
• “Because I dream I am Winston Churchill . . .”
• Why Am I Making This Noise
• “My grandparents’ house and barn . . .”
• Heroism at the End of Middle Age
• “For a long time after . . .”
• Scatter
• “The church is nondenominational . . .”
• “It is hard work . . .”
• My Father’s Deafness
• “Jung explains my resistance . . .
• Watergate
• “My father is disappointed . . .”
• Childhood Ends
• “Oh story of Alabama, you are not just my story . . .”
• Patriotism That Beautiful and Dangerous Idiocy
• “One Wednesday night . . .”
• In the Living Room after Dinner
• The Things of This World I Looked for I Did Not See
• “In 1965 I renounce public prayer . . .”
• Trying to Believe / We Are Endangered
• How Much I Loved This Life
• “Thank you electricity . . .”
• In a Dream of Chivalry
• “When I say I take Kafka into my heart . . .”
• The Manufacturing of Copper Tubing Has Changed Very Little in the Past 70 Years
• “After Bird and Leona visit . . .”
• All Human Time Is Simultaneous
• “The common idea of Alabama . . .”
• Going Home
• “In one year my sister and I select two caskets . . .”
• What Will Not Be Spoken
• “We make five trips back . . .”
• For Katy
• Effacement
• NOTES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR