The Body and the End of Time

Poems Selected and New, 1985–2025

Rodney Jones, Dave Smith

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807187609
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Comprised of poems selected from eleven previous volumes and accompanied by work from the past half decade, The Body and the End of Time represents the distilled evolution of one of the most fluent, generous, and embracing voices to emerge in American poetry since the Vietnam War era. Prophetic in the tradition of William Blake and Walt Whitman and equally suspicious of received wisdom, Rodney Jones is a master of discernment and revelation, driven by an urgency to bring language and witness to the sudden erosion of the local, the obsolescence of the homegrown, the erstwhile mysticism of the makeshift. Redefining the boundaries between narrative and lyricism, "Classical revision and Romantic improvisation," high and low culture, logic and dream, Jones creates an inimitable full-spectrum poetic vision in a world that has little use for poetry. By turns elegiac and celebratory, provocative and playful, these are love poems dedicated to places and bonds, to manners and accents, but most importantly to the people—the dreamers and farmers, road pavers, running backs, waitresses, and shade-tree existentialists—that form the distinctive music and texture of the American South.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• FROM The Unborn, Transparent Gestures, AND Apocalyptic Narrative (1985–1993)
• FROM Things That Happen Once AND Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1996–1999)
• FROM Kingdom of the Instant, Salvation Blues, AND Imaginary Logic (2002–2011)
• FROM Twelve Fables Set in the Shawnee Hills (2014)
• FROM Village Prodigies AND Alabama (2017–2023)
• New Poems, 2023–2025
• NOTES AND DEDICATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX OF TITLES
• INDEX OF FIRST LINES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR