Bird in the Machine, Poems by Eve Jones
The poems of Eve Jones’ Bird in the Machine are dark with foreboding, their intense images and dense rhythms harkening a fearsome world where redemption is elusive.
“Eve Jones’ first collection of poetry, Bird in the Machine, mirrors the dynamic movement of its title as a wrought, wild, flinging energy housed within carefully crafted language. I am in love with this book and find that on each read I must pause at moments to catch my breath. The ‘machine’ of language here knows enough of the wild beating within its deliberate constructs to understand also that in the end, what is measured and sure becomes lost if what is wild becomes tame; for this reason Jones’ Machine spins its cogs beneath the thrashing wings, churns its engines along side of the feral heart, as a symbiotic understanding that the measured and the rampant, here, depend on one another as assuredly as the heart and lungs must find some unison in order for the body to thrive. As readers, we hear the speaker tell us ‘You were a dark room I entered feeling the walls./I was too far inside you to see anymore’ and we are also blinded, understanding, as in ‘The Revelation of Helen Keller’ that ‘the dream of a dream is the body’ which we long to escape but, also, is a locus to which we continually come back like a lover who quenches her desire and longing with habitual return. We do not enter this collection leaning on the speaker but instead understand her vulnerability, so that when she tells us ‘Even now I am walking through the poem,/ the large, unexpected room of it” or that she ‘wants to tell this honestly—/a blind man pokes with is blind cane’ we, also, find comfort without sight. The things that marry each of us to one another are the artifacts of our blindness, the way we make something, anything, of the unusual and foreign objects we encounter in blindness, encounter with every other sense and sensibility, all turning in a mind’s eye, a heart’s touch. Jones drives home the inner compulsion we have to understand our landscape not as we might first see the landscape, but as the landscape secretly reveals itself at its darkest corners, and so, tells us something, also, of our own deep recessions.”—Ruth Ellen Kocher
“Nothing is innocent, Eve Jones tells us, No one’s responsible. The world is fierce, trammelled, enflamed—and still everything feels new. Even grief, even loss. These poems are wildly felt and extraordinarily smart. Jones makes us feel as though she has eyes that are slightly different from the rest of us—and what she takes in makes her burn.”—David Lazar
Eve Jones’s poetry has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she teaches writing and humanities and lives with her family in St. Louis.