Reflections on the Dark Water

This collection takes as its subjects loss and memory in the landscapes and wild spaces of the American South, connecting and weaving personal losses with the larger threads of ecological disruption and environmental degradation. These poems seek wildness in industrial, pastoral, rural, and urban places--places neither wholly sacred nor fully desecrated. Memories of growing up in Alabama and surviving family tragedy all push the speaker outward, seeking connections with "that other world" outside ourselves. Praise for Reflections on the Dark Water: Reflections on the Dark Water concerns itself with memory and myth, how the bridge between the two--how the line where they intersect--is the irrevocable location of history. M.P. Jones crosses that bridge, that line over and again in poems that view the past in order to make sense of the present. This is a book that wants to separate "truth from chaff." --Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament