Keith Jones, Las Palmas

 

lost girl names a continent
“I want to risk 

the forest ahead”    nightride
brisktomb    hours 

& hours    “I will turn to it
so I don’t forget 

where the fabric fades”

Sunday flowers    & a ray

of wealth

The second full-length poetry title by Boston-based poet Keith Jones, following Echo’s Errand (Boston MA/Chicago IL: Black Ocean, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of chapbooks, is the extended lyric suite Las Palmas (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2026). Set in six sections of extended lyric fragments—“lost girl names a continent,” “book of many suns,” “dis appearing island,” “the map cut her body twice,” “in a house no longer there” and “santurce, green bay, crete”—the poems offer themselves as a book-length staggered lyric of gymnastic language, attuned to sound and pacing, pause, very much in keeping with the back cover blurb by Brody Parrish Craig, declaring how Jones’ work in this collection “weaves in intergenerational narrative of place & play that brings voice—no, chorus—to landscapes gathered in our midst.” Jones provides a series, a sequence, of threads and lyric sketchworks on family, culture and geography, articulating points along the wider landscape of generations and home upon his own self, held in the earth. “I lost you there   in the wash /// of metaphysics,” Jones writes, early on in the collection, “an atlas     of the intimate / of blue – that’s what’s happening /// everywhere [.]” There’s a fine, delicate touch Jones offers across language, across touchstones of subject and narrative, that appear to skim across the surface, revealing, instead, the water’s actual depth. Jones writes the intimacy of a dream-setting with concrete markers, offering a landscape of pinpoints, one set against the other in near-infinite steps, and one might even see comparables here to the essay-lyrics of, for example, Canadian poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure (especially across Hall’s ongoing, extended pacings), accruing a landscape as much as describing one, while working through the logic of examination.

“how to insist    a body as a home // of being,” he writes, mid-way through the collection. Jones’ stagger-sequence of pause and accumulated phrases, writing home and all its bearings, from the foundation of family to both the external and internal elements of mapping, placement and being. This is an intimate poem, a poem of inquiry and meditation, as much fire and delicate touch in every carefully-placed word. As the opening lines of the first poem-section begins:

while on earth      light brown   mix
-ed island brown 

hard to see   light-skinned
vellum or parchment 

ink-sheathed   the boy in me

polished the sun    isles
of mother’s eyes 

inside    abuela, you smile at me

& become a dove

squint thru   loss’s glare sky’s
asylum 

& orphaned sun   stitch by stitch
the larger braid 

oraclewind blew, that is water