Painkiller: Poems Written 2000-2006

Painkiller is the final book in a trilogy of collections that started with The Weather That Kills (1995), followed by Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha, 1996). Of these three collections, the poems in Painkiller are the most emotional and intimate, and yet they are also the most universal as they look at the consequences of love found and lost; passions unleashed; terror from human conduct and the awesome power of natural disaster. While this is a collection that responds in part to 9-11, many poems were written prior to that event, to the injury to the city and our psychic well-being. Those portents and that injury set the collection’s tone. Painkiller explores one poet’s vision of the city, her friends, her lover, her losses and connects those individual perceptions to a suffering world in turmoil. In the poem ＂In Like Paradise/Out Like the Blues＂, a poem from The Weather That Kills, Patricia Spears Jones wrote: ＂Each of turns to the hunger of stars/and wipes the crumbs from our mouths.＂ Painkiller is about that feast.

PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is author of the poetry collections: Femme du Monde, Tia Chucha Press and The Weather That Kills, Coffee House Press; and two chapbooks: MythologizingAlways (Telephone Books) and Repuestas! (Belladonna Books). She is a contributing editor to Bomb and Heliotrope and editor of WB, a mimeo literary magazine published in 1975 at St. Mark’s Church. In addition, she’s received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Goethe Institute and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She continues to curate poetry events most recently with the Center for Book Arts. She works as an arts administrator, poetry and creative writing instructor, and fundraiser.