The Beloved Community: Bed-Stuy Book Launch
Patricia Spears Jones with Nicole Callihan and Ricardo Maldonado
We are pleased to welcome Patricia Spears Jones, Nicole Callihan, and Ricardo Maldonado as we work to constitute a Beloved Community.
Dedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, The Beloved Community sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us.
In her fifth poetry collection, The Beloved Community, Jackson Poetry Prize–winner Patricia Spears Jones interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal. From lyric to elegy, far-reaching poems use wordplay and metaphor to create richly textured landscapes in search of community. As we traverse delis, laundromats, and the Brooklyn block where morning glories grow “leaves plump as Italian cookies,” poems about poverty, art, and community become poems about location—always the city is alive and breathing.
Later, the collection widens its view, leaving Brooklyn to visit the consequences of violence across America. From the Atlanta Child Murders to the murder of Nia Wilson, The Beloved Community is fearless in its rage and hope as it explores what disrupts—oppression, injustice, loss, grief, and a fraught sense of the erotic. Largely dedicated to musicians, artists, and fellow poets, Jones acknowledges art as a tool for both care and resistance, recognizing that “voice is our greatest magic.” Imbued with history, laced with tenderness, and channeling a long tradition of the blues in African American poetics, The Beloved Community speaks with spark and urgency.
Bed-Stuy-based poet Patricia Spears Jones is the author of four collections including A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (2015) and five chapbooks. Her work has been anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and she is the editor of Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets.
Jones is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. An active literary citizen of New York for over four decades, Jones served as program coordinator for The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church and founded the WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. Currently, Jones is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.
Nicole Callihan’s semantic debates and whimsical linguistics in This Strange Garment open the reader to more than the pain, treatment, and aftermath of breast cancer. We also get the “god in the scars.” Hers is a mind of lyrical curiosity, turning life around and finding prisms. Let her show you how to “place lady slipper orchids where your flesh used to be.” Let these poems pull you into a life “severed but raptured.”
—Lauren Camp, 2022-2025 New Mexico Poet Laureate
The speaker of the poems in The Life Assignment is reviewing his history. As if sorting through a box of photographs, the speaker sorts through relationships, trying to discern what was healthy from what was exploitative. Concepts of love are turned over and over in these poems: romantic love, love of family, love of country, self-love (or lack thereof). Often the speaker finds that what at first appeared to be caring, was insincere all along. When tenderness is in short supply, how can one protect himself? How can one find home? In his debut collection, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado bends poems through bilingual lyrics that present spartan observation as evidence for its exacting verdict: “We never leave when life is elsewhere. The clemency of men disappears / as does the light, tarring the roofs.” An electric debut collection.