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From what do we assemble ourselves, of what fervors is that scene of us comprised? Jones Very-named after Ralph Waldo Emerson's haunted acolyte-is an ecology of oxymel and abacus. The questions it nurses, the visions it tenders, accumulate by way of atmosphere and filigree. And its ensuing micro-scenes (last straw maquette and intimacy salvage) give off what Thoreau might call the bronze light of when the world that lights our own moves in or out of eclipse. If friendship is a way of inventing a still improbable manner of being, the rapport of Jones Very- "conducted... from the rumor / of our formerly / transponding selves"-is its pine needle almanac. The tessellating virtue of this enterprise: that we move through it without shorthand, feeling the lavishness of its undertow as our own. "I live there," Jones Very tells us, "in the factory of a feather / wristed voice." In the seer's practicum, the romance of its warbled over-time.
About the author
Michael D. Snediker is the author of The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, winner of the Poets Out Loud prize) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (punctum books, Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry), as well as Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (University of Minnesota Press) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press). He is the fortunate recipient of multiple residencies at Yaddo, and is presently Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston.
