Plunge by Alice Jones Berkeley, CA:  Apogee Press

Each moment's wake creates the next turn and you're again inside a body. You reach outside. What's a membrane anyway? (“Plunge,” p. 36)

Alice Jones's latest book of poetry, Plunge, is a kinesthetic pleasure. In the ten poems comprising this book, Jones utilizes the poetic form of the sestina to convey the movement of body and mind in interaction with inner and outer world.

The invention of the sestina is usually attributed to Arnaut Daniel, a troubadour of 12th-century Provence. The sestina is structured as a 39-line poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-line stanza. The six words that end each line of the first stanza repeat as the end words in each of the following stanzas according to a schematized rotational order. The three lines of the last stanza by definition must end with one of the six end words, while the remaining three words must appear somewhere in the body of the final stanza.1

This form has been thought to function as an expression of complaint — the rigorous demands of the form itself creating the experience of complaint by the very effort to conform or contort it.2 Jones's elegant rendition of the form suggests another possibility for the creation of this effect. In her poems, there is an awareness of other possibilities existing and pressing for consciousness, though not always attaining full expression. There is a haunting sadness to some of the poems; a sadness of longing and of memories recalled while simultaneously fading.