In Passport, his 20th book, Richard Jones has moved increasingly from the lyric grounded in the everyday to a kind of magical realism where he sees in daily life transformations all around, as if a curtain has parted or he has touched the hem of some great mystery. “Reading is like magic,” says one of his characters. “Though desolate and broken, we can love the way the world flows together.” In Jones’s poems the search never ends; the answer itself resides in asking the right questions.

Praise

Passport proves, yet again, that Richard Jones is a master poet. —Jack Grapes

Richard Jones celebrates the dizzying travel through time and space that play with words and imagination affords us. The poems take us with him in a dream to visit the spirits of his mother and father in Tierra del Fuego, into the lives of words in the Oxford dictionary, or create a fable of the appraiser critiquing his house: “it floats a few inches above the ground, which is not code.” Each poem is a marvel of another world opening up: on “The Last Night,” “Time will not be / running out / but just beginning.” You need your own copy of Passport to accompany this philosophical, literate, and humane poet on his journey. —Robin Chapman

Richard Jones’s passport is the imagination, and his poems the astonishing realms he travels. From trampolines to tomorrows, from windshield wipers to wisteria, his poetic currency is the ordinary and extraordinary. The poems are never remote: more like wisdoms big and small from someone who lives like us but who travels more radically—a kind and expert poet in love with a world full of goodbyes. —Chris Solis Green

Also by Richard Jones

• Avalon

• Avalon (signed, limited-edition hardcover)

• The Minor Key

• “Devotion” (broadside)