The Knot
Alice Jones
1992 Beatrice Hawley Award
“Whether chronicling the dying of an ex-lover (to whom the first third of the book is dedicated) from AIDS, exploring the peculiar, grim intimacy of the medical student’s relationship with her anatomy-class cadaver, or pondering womb-life and birth, the narrator in Jones’ poems emerge as consistently complex and deeply human, integrating in a single voice the vision and experience of woman as lover, mother, physician, daughter.” "The Knot is an extraordinary combination of lyricism, mythmaking, and an
informed use of the language of medicine. We have had William Carlos Williams, the
doctor-poet—now here is a woman, skilled at the same kind(s) of work, and with her
own forceful voice." "Poets and psychoanalysts have, in very different ways, to become masters of
metaphor. Alice Jones is both a poet and a psychoanalyst. Her wonderful poems exemplify
Freud's statement, 'The ego is first and foremost a body-ego,' and illustrate the
importance of the body (one's own and one's parents') to the mind at every stage of
life." Author photo by Sara Hartley
—Phoebe
—Alicia Ostriker
—Leonard Shengold, M.D.
about the author
Alice Jones's books from Alice James Books are The Knot which won the Beatrice Hawley Award in 1992 and Isthmus, winner of the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award in 2000. Anatomy, a letterpress chapbook, was published by Bullnettle Press in 1997. Extreme Directions (The fifty four moves of Tai Chi Sword) was published by Omnidawn Press in 2002. Jones has been awarded fellowships by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts. Gorgeous Mourning won the 2001 Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and was published by Apogee Press in February, 2004. Poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Volt, Colorado Review, Poetry, The Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, and Best American Poetry of 1994. She is a co-editor of Apogee Press and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
