Two Poems:
"Ghosts"
"Belissima"
from Patricia Spears Jones's
Femme du Monde

Patricia Spears Jones:

Born and raised in Forrest City, Arkansas, poet Patricia Spears Jones has lived in New York City since the mid-1970s. She is the author of The Weather That Kills (Coffee House) and Mythologizing Always (Telephone Books), and her poetry has been widely anthologized. Her play, “Mother,” was commissioned by Mabou Mines and premiered at La Mama in 1994. Her articles on theater, film, literature, the visual arts, and music have appeared in Essence, Heresies, Bomb, The Village Voice, and many others. She has taught at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Parsons School of Design, Naropa University, and for Cave Canem, and has performed widely. Patricia has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute, and fellowships to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. (Photo by Teri Slotkin)

About Femme du Monde:

"The French may say femme du monde, but we may say 'sophisticated lady.' Whichever way you put it, that is who Patricia Spears Jones is. Her intelligent imagination encompasses the 'corrupted globe,' history, and movies, as do her sharp empathy and tenderness. Her poems have indomitable style and sizzling wit. Femme du Monde gives us a map of intellect and dissent. Don't you want to travel?"
— Angela Jackson

"Patricia Spears Jones is a cosmopolitan blues goddess – alive on the wind stream of transnational homemade intimate gossip. Her poems are a highly effective antidote to living in a country where caring seems to have been placed on the Endangered Activities list. Just to say it loud & clear: Femme du Monde will move & entertain you, amply, wisely, with all heart intact."
— David Rivard

"In Femme du Monde, Patrica Spears Jones reminds me of those wisecracking, foolproof women in the old films she so lovingly dissects – the ones whose deadsure, replenishing humor and never-fail good sense cause the audience to sit up and clap."
— Cyrus Cassells

"Patrica Spears Jones spots the works of third world women in the midst of commercial plenty, demands searing truth in romantic heartbreak, laments the death of friends succumbed to aids. Her powerful voice erupts with hope and lyric when she proclaims, 'People on their knees know how to get up.'"
— Maureen Owen

"These poems all possess a wise and natural nothing (to prove) ness full of a new breed of aesthetic energy. The witnessing is active and the traveler wide awake and more than comfortable in her skin of lyrical and, often, cinematic patience. Here, modern thinking and modern feeling equal wholeness, superior and human."
— Thomas Sayers Ellis

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