A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Spears Jones (White Pine Press, paperback)
Publication Date: November 10, 2015
Publisher Marketing:
"Vibrant with the intensity of blues singers."--Feminist Bookstore News
"Patricia Spears Jones is cosmopolitan blues goddess alive on the wind stream of transnational homemade intimate gossip. Her poems are a highly effective antidote to living in a country where caring seems to have been placed on the Endangered Activities list."--David Rivard
"Patricia Spears Jones reminds me of those wisecracking, foolproof women in the old films she so lovingly dissects--the ones whose deadsure, replenishing humor and never-fail good sense causes the audience to sit up and clap."--Cyrus Cassells
"She has given us a world where music and brains are allowed to co-exist with instinct, where the lyric and the literal may dwell without eyeing the other with suspicion."--Cornelius Eady
From "The Perfect Lipstick":
It is why I appreciate my favorite shade of lipstick:
Sherry Velour.
Sounds like the name of a drag queen from the early seventies.
One of those strapping Black men who had enough of playing macho,
put their feet in five-inch heels and made saints of Dinah Washington,
Rita Hayworth and a very young Nina Simone.
So, on goes this lipstick. Pretty for parties.
Fatal for festivals.
Sherry Velour and her hot discoveries:
light above the fog,
a toy ship.
Black men in sequined dresses and the click of new words
in the new world where the most dangerous of dreams
come true.
