Lois P. Jones
Lois P. Jones’s Night Ladder chronicles how the world moves spiritually and sensually through us, while also recognizing how we move through the world, watching “clouds / turn from oblivion into spectacle, / burning the world as they go.” There is a timelessness to these poems, a conversation with the present as well as with Lorca, Rilke, Picasso, and more—as if the voice of this book has slipped the temporal bounds that tether most voices to a date in history, a moment in time. Jones asks: “…what can we carry but a chance // to remember how a man is a lantern / lowered into the earth.” Astonishing. Beautiful. The poems in Night Ladder guide us on an exploration of that eternal question with a deft and mature hand. You’ll likely read these poems in quiet solitude, and then, I hope, you’ll want to share them aloud with someone you love.
—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country
