The Beloved Community

By Patricia Spears Jones

Dedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, The Beloved Community sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us.

In her fifth poetry collection, The Beloved Community, Jackson Poetry Prize winner Patricia Spears Jones interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal. From lyric to elegy, far-reaching poems use word play and metaphor to create richly textured landscapes in search of community. As we traverse delis, laundromats, and the Brooklyn block where morning glories grow “leaves plump as Italian cookies,” poems about poverty, art, and community, become poems about location—always the city is alive and breathing. Later, the collection widens its view, leaving Brooklyn to visit the consequences of violence across America. 

From the Atlanta Child Murders to the murder of Nia Wilson, The Beloved Community is fearless in its rage and hope as it explores what disrupts— oppression, injustice, loss, grief, and a fraught sense of the erotic. Largely dedicated to musicians, artists, and fellow poets, Jones acknowledges art as tools for both care and resistance, recognizing that “voice is our greatest magic.” Imbued with history, laced with tenderness, and channeling a long tradition of the blues in African American poetics, The Beloved Community speaks with spark and urgency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781619322820

Book preview

Cover: The Beloved Community by Patricia Spears Jones

The Beloved Community

PATRICIA SPEARS JONES

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Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

To my peers, who have shown great faith in art, poetry, and community.

Someone has walked this way before

All the world’s music in her hands

Under the starlight

That she wished

Could lead away to freedom

LORENZO THOMAS, DISCOVERING AMERICA AGAIN

Contents

Title Page

Note to the Reader

Lave

One

Morning Glory

Oh, That Brazilian Guy

Poverty

Trophic Cascade

Lee Breuer dies and I clean my stove top

Saturnine

Fortune’s Wheel

Walking on Avenue A on the Tompkins Square Park Side

New Orleans BOP

Leontyne Price sings Pace, pace, mio Dio

Purgatorio—divine comedy—again

Something’s in the air

Betye Saar’s Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress

Mermaid and Surf

First and last nights in Virginia, January and May 2020

Morning Song

Answer This

Lytic, or how not to see The Strawberry Moon

Self-Portrait as retratos de cosas locas y de locos (stolen)

Dancer

Lipstick Considered

Seraphim

Siren Song

Anne Boyer makes a new word

Hannah’s Cigar Box (memory & invention)

Thanksgiving/Boston 2013

The Beloved Community

Poet

Two

Saturday Brooklyn, July 17, 2017

an American haze

Cousins

The skin of the thing

Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt sing Telling Me Lies

On the death of Claribel Alegría, 1924–2018

Crying in Cassis for The Queen of Soul—Aretha Franklin dead at 76

For Geri Allen

Ghost Country

Milk Ice

Celia Cruz Snow angels

Fred Hampton Born This Day

Adornment

The Poem at Sea

The pace of ferocity

Green Ribbons

Nia

The Fifth of July, 2020

Defiant

LOOK BACK IN HATRED

Comedy with Flutes

Speaking Sparks

Notes

About the Author

Books by Patricia Spears Jones

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Special Thanks

The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South. (1941)

The female workers were the last to arrive north. (1993)

CAPTIONS BY JACOB LAWRENCE

Lave

Where is the lavender, the purple scent

That says the world is fresh and ready to receive

The woman who walks into whatever room

She walks into. What room will she enter?

How will the female worker smell? Lemon, mint,

Roses crushed for homemade soap. No place

Here for the boiling recipe. There is no room.

And her extra money, how will she make it?

Who will she do for? How will she get there?

Will she find her old friends, her lovers?

She is lonely.

The artist says in Panel 57 that the female worker

(not Negro, not migrant) is the last group to leave the South.

One woman is her own group?

Was she ready to leave or was she

Left behind? Caring for: baby, grandfather,

Brother, sister, cousin, an elderly aunt?

Was her