Dangers by Rodney Jones Rodney Jones has used abrupt and sometimes jarring turns in his poems from early on, setting the challenge to himself of integrating them into the movements of the poems as wholes, so that they maintain cracked veneers but also a deeper, usually thematic unity. Maybe the most violent example comes in “First Coca-Cola,” with the shift from a scene of drinking the soda to an electric chair death, and the most transcendental at the end of “Song of Affirmation,” with the shift from existential to “Almighty is the god.” “Dangers” is the poem that seems the most composed of them. It could be argued that there are lots of turns within the poem, but I’ll focus on four that…
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