To read Paul Jones is to behold how there is always “still some place deeper, / some place both dark and alive.” In formally versatile, emotionally visceral poems, he immerses us in the body and spirit of the timeless everyday: tomato sandwiches, watermelons, vape shops, graveyards, basketball, grief, memory, friendship, marriage, poverty, flying kites, and Dolly Parton. Throughout it all, we have the natural world: the animal kingdom, the seas, the air, and the ground right in front of us.

In that emphasis on the everyday, his poetry practices the hope that we might at last “be free from the nation of strangers.” His poems do “the work of roots, / how each strand reaches for its neighbor.” That’s the work we should do too, and we’ve got Paul Jones to point the way, take our hand, and walk with, stepping forward together.

–Andy Fogle, author of Mother Countries and poetry editor of Salvation South

Paul Jones’ new collection, Something Necessary, transports us to the ordinary, where it aims and presses down like a Fresnel lens to redirect the light, imbued with a beauty that was always thought too small to see, to sailors such as us as we head for port at night. What results in this alphabetically arranged collection is the sweep of days past, of the stories we tell ourselves, how maturity looks back on youth, and how the need for empowering narrative frames memory.The result is a vividly detailed and sweeping collection, at once relatable and wonderfully accessible.Clive James wrote that it is so difficult for a poet to achieve clarity that if he can manage it, it should be his duty never to be any other way.In Something Necessary, Paul Jones summons that lucidity and writes with grace in his bones.

–David Rigsbee, Watchman in the Knife Factor, New and Selected Poems

[Paul Jones’] great gift, as I see it, is imagination, which can take many forms: imitation, parody, wit, surprise, transgression, shock, bewilderment, and on and on. He is our great contemporary metaphysical poet. When I read a poem by Jones, I think of Wallace Stevens’s maxim from “Adagia”: “Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language.” The cover art of Jones’s Something Wonderful makes me think of Maurice Sendak. So, with that, “Let the wild rumpus start!”

–Jim Clark, Review of Something Wonderful in North Carolina Literary Review

About the Author

Paul Jones’ first collection of poems from Redhawk Publications, Something Wonderful, appeared in 2021. His work has also been published in several anthologies including Best American Erotic Poems (1800-Present).

A manuscript of his poems crashed into the moon’s surface in 2019. Another moon shot in February 2024 landed successfully.

In 2021, Jones was inducted into the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame. He is Professor Emeritus of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

In 2024, Jones’ poem “Geode” was plagiarized multiple times by the notorious serial offender John Kucera.

For more, see http://smalljones.com

You may also find Paul Jones on most social media sites as @smalljones.