widely across a variety of forms, from novels to children's books to a highly regarded treatise on the ethics of hunting. This is his first full-length collection of poetry. "These poems," Jones writes in the Afterword, "as far as I can tell now, are about late-life fatherhood, they're about aging and mortality, they're about trying to see clearly. They're about trying to discover what I think. They're exercises in self-pity and self-absorption. They are coins tossed off the back of a train. They are the 4:00 am rants of an insomniac and they are the prissy, curated bonsai trees of a pompous little nitpicker. They're doorstops you trip over and Rorschach oil spills you slide across. Most of all, though, they're the rubberized ceiling straps you grab onto when the bus lurches away from the curb."