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

 

Danielle LaFrance, Verbal Violence

 

From:
Date:
Subject: [Internal]
To:

            _________________________________________________

there is no position if not written down. all ways storied, all
ways factoid. 

what unifies the hadith of policies. Who provides what time
to: break disrespectful responses: report serious comportment:
develop diaphoresis in advance of a pool forms not safe for
work. 

who sedulously avoids all political discussion in the workplace:
people who manage other people are concerned with what
works: 

a migration of orphaned socks discharges who, what evidences
of good intentions over thousands of years over who,
what is every one if not forced thingification. 

what is beyond the point of instruction to decipher needle
fingering, double-talking, incorporating gravings. 

such great utopian wrath!

The latest from Vancouver poet Danielle LaFrance, following Species Branding (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2010) [see my review of such here], Friendly + Fire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016) [see my review of such here], JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here] and #postdildo (Talonbooks, 2022), is the poetry title Verbal Violence (Talonbooks, 2026), a collection that “unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class.” LaFrance explores and examines the specific dehumanizing language of business, comparable to Canadian poet Syd Zolf’s explorations through office language in their remarkable Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) [see my review of such here], both titles attempting, in their own ways, to reclaim the human condition of and through language, class and stripped meanings. One can see this title the direct result of recent declarations around the destruction of Gaza to wildfires, as governments and politicians have been playing fast and loose with language through misrepresentation, dehumanization and outright fabrication. “about this / class structure.” LaFrance writes, mid-way through the collection, “neoliberal / institutions were / never neutral until / the burden of / oppression. hand / in glove no one / told hamas don’t / fit the picture.”

There is a way that LaFrance’s ongoing work fits deep within and extends a language tradition of social justice and resistance, specifically in and around Vancouver, centred around (but not the exclusive purview of) The Kootenay School of Writing—with other contemporary practitioners including ryan fitzpatrick, Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen, Christine Leclerc, Scott Inniss, Cecily Nicholson, Kevin Davies, Rita Wong and Marie AnnHarte Baker, among others—a practice that not only emerges from those ethical structures, but one that furthers conversation around and through contemporary political crises. These are poems fearlessly composed, harnessing a fiercely intellectual rage around settler colonialism and violence, composed with swagger, gesture and an unrelenting humanity. Through a book dedicated “for every one, / mostly for miscreants,” Verbal Violence is structured through repeated loops of “From:,” “Date:,” “Subject:” and “To:,” as LaFrance writes, early in the collection: “in this day, that age, who said who will be in who’s sacred place when who is rerouted to a community mailbox. what is required at this roaring time to communicate critical taunts beginning with a hard g, finished off by a hand-held bubble machine.” As LaFrance’s “ENDNOTES.v3.pdf” at the end of the collection opens:

In 2021 an unadulterated disdain for work as such emerged anew. Back to business, the order of things, cushioned by new investment in nineties pop psychology turned “wellness culture” amid a global pandemic, and then, in 2024, the last vestige of belief in any liberal democratic institution was put to rest with the professional managerial class’s shameful complicity in the destruction of Gaza, the newest development in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Wrapped around these time signatures, a stranglehold, was the making of this account.