On receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his third book, Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones was hailed as "a brand-new world-class poet." This collection of poems, rich in irony, sensuousness, and pleasure, reveals his robust, humorous, earthy, and cerebral view of reality and his exploration of all regions and sensibilities of American life.

A powerful and original poet possessing tremendous energy Rodney Jones achieves his most poignant and emotionally driven collection in Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems.

Rodney Jones writes: 'These poem issue from the touchstones of my life: the powers of childhood, the stoical relationships of men, familial and sexual communion with women, the kindred lives of animals, the creation and embodiment of myth- and finally, the wish to evoke the sources of present attitudes and behaviors...'

Exulting in the speech of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones's new poems combine satire and ode, formal lament and ribald joke. James Dickey praised this poet's early work as "one of our most poignant and inescapable renditions of the agony at the historical razor's edge." Now, in his sixth book, Jones extends his emotional and stylistic range. He writes of football and feminism, of DDT and family, of crows and sex, of ink and raccoons and perpetual-motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in it.