Lois P. Jones, co-host of Moonday Poetry series and host of Poets' Cafe (KPFK), launches her poetry book "Night Ladder"

Lois P. Jones’s Night Ladder chronicles how the world moves spiritually and sensually through us, while also recognizing how we move through the world, watching “clouds / turn from oblivion into spectacle, / burning the world as they go.” There is a timelessness to these poems, a conversation with the present as well as with Lorca, Rilke, Picasso, and more—as if the voice of this book has slipped the temporal bounds that tether most voices to a date in history, a moment in time. Jones asks: “…what can we carry but a chance / to remember how a man is a lantern/ lowered into the earth.” Astonishing. Beautiful. The poems in Night Ladder guide us on an exploration of that eternal question with a deft and mature hand. You’ll likely read these poems in quiet solitude, and then, I hope, you’ll want to share them aloud with someone you love.
—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country

Against all that's occurring around us, the very existence of these poems seems a miracle - their deep shimmering beauty, their sense of mystery, as full of light as shadow, and a kind of inviolate purity rare in today's poetry, rare anywhere. Lois P. Jones is a remarkable imagist and an uncommon talent. And it occurs to me that these poems hold just what readers so often turn to poetry for, to be carried deeper into themselves and also in the sensory, and sensual, outer world, and forward that indestructible goodness that prevails through time and against every opposition. - Suzanne Lummis, author of Open 24 Hours

Here is a poet who dares everything—she sings, she philosophizes, she converses with the dead—to bring us closer, impossibly, to what we have lost. “I will be the spirit of your / departed,” she writes. And so she is, in every haunted line, but she is also a guide to our arriving—in this world, where the living is.
—Joseph Fasano, author of Vincent

Lois P. Jones has work published or forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal as well as several anthologies including The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing), Wide Awake:  Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond (The Pacific Coast Poetry Series) edited by Suzanne Lummis, 30 Days (Tupelo Press), and Good-Bye Mexico (Texas Review Press). Some publications include Narrative, American Poetry Journal, One, (Jacar Press), Tupelo Quarterly, The Warwick Review, Tiferet, Cider Press Review, Askew, and other journals in the United States and abroad. Lois’s poems have won honors under judges Kwame Dawes, Fiona Sampson, Ruth Ellen Kocher and others. The New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear selected “Ouija” as Poem of the Year in the competition sponsored by Web del Sol. She is the winner of the 2012 Tiferet Poetry Prize and the 2012 Liakoura Prize, and a seven-time Pushcart nominee. Her poem "Foal" received the 2016 Bristol Poetry Prize and her work was recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in poetry. Lois is poetry editor at Kyoto Journal, host of KPFK’s Poets Café (Pacifica Radio), and co-host of Moonday Poetry in La Cañada, California. Her first collection of poems, Night Ladder, is Glass Lyre Press’s 2017 Book Award winner.