The Weather That Kills

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her first collection, Jones illuminates ``the secret joy beneath grim turbulence'' that propels these poems into her readers' hearts and minds. Exploring ``the daily material that makes a life being lived'' with a fluent intelligence, she connects the personal to political, self to other, then to now. Rooted in the complexity of the American experience, she traces the presence of the human spirit-heroic, betrayed, betraying-in art, history, geography, politics and popular culture with riveting shifts of scale and focus. ``The Perfect Lipstick'' moves from a consideration of Christopher Columbus to the slave trade and then leaps assuredly to her ``favorite shade of lipstick, Sherry Velour,'' whose name suggests ``Black men in sequined dresses and the click of new words/ in the new world where the most dangerous of dreams/ come true.'' In ``Glad All Over,'' the poet, an African American, recounts her childhood experience of the civil rights struggle in the South during the '60s in a quiet, truthful telling that gives tribute to ``our family's ordinary courage'' and creates a compelling, defining image of a pivotal time. (June)