Jones, Ever: nightsong

Sundress Publications, paperback

Publication Date: June 29, 2020

Publisher Marketing: Written between the Pulse nightclub shooting and Obama's final day of presidency, Jones explores the underside of the industrial complexes that choke our world. The lyrics in nightsong hum a vigil for trans and queer bodies: animals of feather and fur, teeth and claws, pulling forward into another space. When the world is asleep these poems tenderly dissolve social constructions designed to erase, then sing for their liberation.

"Given the threats to the trans body, to our body politic, and to the body of creation, nightsong might well have been a desolate report on our desolate times. Instead it is a book of glowing vision. In poems that are alert to the luminosity of what we call nature, to the violence that constitutes our national identity, and to the moments of being where the animal body and lyric consciousness meet, nightsong describes the pain and wonder that are at the crux of transformation. Ever Jones is very much the poet we need now--aggrieved, singing." --Rick Barot, author of The Galleons

"In measured lines rich with urgency, nightsong draws us a tender map for surviving our queer bodies. Jones writes, 'if pronouns must be in agreement with their subjects / then i was made weather, a stretching infinitive.' The poems in this collection, indistinguishable as individual poems, are an enactment of that stretching, calling us to expand ourselves beyond language, beyond articulation. Equal parts elegy, earth, and relational entanglement, nightsong is a deeply necessary book, and so many of us will feel visible in its landscape. Even in unending grief, and with unshakable precision, Jones' poetic gift is in making queer life and queer language more possible. In reading this work, you will find yourself grateful." --Stacey Waite, author of the lake has no saint