Imaginary Logic

"It's Jones's age-defying distinction to have mobilized a moral intelligence that's sufficiently vast to contain multitudes."- Washington Post Book World Imaginary Logic is a brilliantly expansive, deeply meditative, and at times wildly imaginative collection of poems that combines Rodney Jones's distinctive storytelling ability, sharp social intelligence, and keen powers of observation in a book that is wistful, satiric, audacious, and remorseless. "The Art of Heaven" opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Jones's readers have come to rely on: "In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things aren't quite paradise." Jones, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of America's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" ( Poetry ). Imaginary Logic is the most eloquent expression yet of his rigorous mind, scrupulous eye, and capacious heart. "[Jones'] poems are a work of hands, and hands-on. His rich lyric sentences register experience at the full and thus at its high moment of complexity. Like most of the important poets, he's a lapsed pastoralist attempting to restore-no, save-the fallen."-Stanley Plumly