“The poetry of Keith Jones never loses velocity as a skimming gleam of consciousness just short of earth. Shortness of breath where the ladders of written words go up and down at the same time, not messages, or facts you can contradict, the errands they are on are like boomerangs of wind and echoes of elven hammers and javelins. We live in echo time.”

“In Keith Jones’ world, we can only know by feeling. Both generous and violent—as being beat, beaten, and slapped by the surrealist’s hand—the poems capture the weary, needy state of human body: what it is to have a body, to need love, to feel pain. Jones’ voice comes across, always, like an oracle’s beating heart, like a prayer whispered at the altar of the word.”

“Jones’s moral concerns move backward through the monstrosities of our history, from Vietnam to Jim Crow South to slavery to Middle Passage to wars on the cusp of recorded time—Xenophon in retreat with his 10,000 men ... It’s a rare poetry that feels the reverberations of humanity’s long harming and being harmed, and yet can also vibrate with a nearly cosmic hope.”

“Striking poems of delicate, tensile, rhythmic and intellectual strength. His poems offer a lightness of line and breath akin to a spider’s web, but one that can hold the weight of an elephant. ”

“Keith Jones approaches the unaccountable in small measures that draw us down to a whole other kind of immensity . . . Jones keeps making sure we know that in the relay between surface and air, ground and song, artists make radical and precise mathematics, deep and unruly history. Like Basquiat, Jones is right there with the ones who do more than we can ask.”

“Keith Jones knows that to honor your ancestors you must also break their thrall.”

“With microtones, concision, and graven diction, Keith Jones weaves taught and gorgeous lines to build his concise and affecting lyricism.”

“Keith Jones both keeps time and eludes it in his own act of epic listening.”