Village Prodigies

"What I was after was something that would rhyme J. M. Barrie and Herman Melville and Samuel Beckett with Eudora Welty."
An imagining of the town of Cold Springs over a period of more than fifty years, swept with drama both quiet and dizzying. "A novel in language as dense and lush and beautiful as poetry . . . [or] a book of poetry with the vivid characters and the narrative force of a novel?" (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls) Read either way, readers will find a familiarity to Jones's previous work—poetry grounded in a sense of place, influenced by vernacular speech.

Village Prodigies steps beyond the parameters and preoccupations of Jones's work in the past, too, taking on new questions and forms, experimenting with convention and time. Working within a multiplicity of points-of-view and techniques, Jones plays with the spaces around poetry and fiction, invention and memory, creating portals through...