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The Butcher, The Teacher, The Poetry Maker

Writer’s Voice Series Features Prize-Winning Alaskan Poet

Arlitia Jones? This woman can flat-out write. Her work’s so fresh and full of energy, the smoke’s still rising from the page.
~Jim Daniels, co-editor of American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)

Arlitia Jones will read from The Bandsaw Riots on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 7:30 pm, University Center, as part of the Writer’s Voice Series.

Beth Spencer of Bear Star Press, publisher of The Bandsaw Riots, writes of Jones’ work:

“Ever dropped by the butcher shop in midwinter to grab a pound of ground round and wondered how those folks in the white coats keep warm? Hint: it ain’t easy! Anchorage poet and meat wrapper Arlitia Jones’ debut collection, The Bandsaw Riots, takes us inside the meat shop as well as the back country with lyrical, defiant, often funny poems that honor the subversive impulse and the struggle to make a living doing hard work in a hard place.

“From the chill of the cutting room where her book opens to the heat of ‘Big Mo’, the 200,000-BTU furnace suspended above the butchers at its close, Jones demonstrates that mighty poems lurk everywhere—they just need scribes (preferably scribes who don’t flinch at getting the gripes right).”

In 1995, Jones received an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she teaches creative writing part-time. Runner-up in the Atlantic Monthly’s college writing contest and recipient of the American Academy of Poets College Poetry Prize, Jones has had work published in Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Jones Building and Maintenance, and Doubletake.