Description: Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.
Brief description: Rodney Jones, the author of eleven books of poetry, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives in New Orleans.
Review Quotes: "Rodney Jones is perhaps the supreme example we have of the southern human person speaking in American poetry."--Kate Daniels