Elsewhere

“There is a word for the prodigal circles we turn / alien on the outskirts” writes Scott Alexander Jones in this book of fragmenting intimacy and emotional exile. His longpoem explores the ravished wanderings and compulsive ruptures of a contemporary romance, born in restlessness, hungry for fresh encounters on ever more uncertain terrain, “blinding & cloudscaped / & groundless.” Fidelities, to person or location, become a series of tenuous sendings, “fluctuations / begun as open winds / in the self-blown distance.” Akin to the amorous exigencies of André Breton and Robert Desnos, elsewhere takes place as rapt incantatory sound, a musical happening, “static, as in: falling in all dimensions away from.”

-Karen Volkman, author of Spar and Crash’s Law

Welcome to elsewhere, a long poem whose mascot insists on the political relevance of rain puddles: “Where a lone sheepdog in a raincoat orange as prisonbreak drags his leash thru / puddles / rainbowed iridescent by the remains / of extinct reptiles.” In dizzyingly musical lines, Scott Alexander Jones documents both “our blue proximity to morning” and “that Listerine™ blueness” blurs the line between long-hidden “lipstick graffiti” and “the severed rings of a sycamore” and insists that “there isn’t a word” for the images he conjures to cloud, confuse, and capture a buried narrative of loss. Elsewhere pulses with emotion, sadness, and beauty linked by observations and objects: “How one day there will be nothing to show that we were ever / here / but stardust. / Yet it’s not for us / sea waves, rain, shuddering leaves and TV snow / all sound like applause.

-Carol Guess, author of Tinderbox Lawn and Doll Studies: Forensics

Elsewhere reads like inspirational text for the skeptic, a daily devotional for the nonbeliever. In the midst of a fading relationship, Jones seeks some truth in wordplay, solace in his impermanence. He does away with not only the watchmaker god, but also the very idea of a personal one. Science and reason aren’t necessarily treated any better. Precambrian amoebas, Listerine, programmed cell death-apparently, this is all just one big cosmic con. But there is hope! From the blissful idiocy of a Daniel Johnston epigraph to the lines “after tomorrow / comes tomorrow / will come tomorrow” this collection masterfully echoes Robert Creeley’s belief that “nothing’s wiser than a moment.

-Harold Whit Williams, author of Backmasking and Waiting for the Fire to Go Out