"The poems of Scott Alexander Jones have a powerful presence and an extraordinary eloquence. The presence is built of exact details, and a sense of place and person; the eloquence is that of natural speech, the speaking voice of a poet-narrator. These are poems one listens to, and inhabits, takes part in. Jones is a fine observer of both the outer and the inner landscapes -- place, passion and psyche. The poems are both personal and large, true to self and widely seeking. Even his briefest poem, "A Template for Abandonment"' gets there: "Crossroads/ of a ghost town/ christened/ for black blades/ of grass/ a tree grows/ from an open/ sewer hatch". This is a fresh, welcome and original new voice, a strong and intelligent talent."          

"Scott Alexander Jones writes with clarity and precision about ambiguities and uncertainties: "In the gathering wind I stop to listen/ to the rumor of rattlesnakes rustling thru the serviceberry." His poems have a complex blend of playfulness and melancholy, irony and sharpness, like the tones and after-tones of a seasoned and well-played guitar. Reading these poems is time well-spent."

"Capable of stylish recursions and switchbacks, the restless speaker of these poems finds an auspicious trailhead just about anywhere at the inconspicuous margins of the present American West. From the WTO protests in Seattle, a vegan co-op in Los Angeles, a Western Montanan skatepark, or his native red Texas clay, Scott might launch one of his self-refining, surefooted excursions, and like the highest climb they are revelatory as outlook broadens. Serviceberry and solidarity at the top. This trail goes on far above that rock I thought was the peak."

                            —Brian Blanchfield, author of Not Even Then


"Scott's poems speak in a voice fraying with remembrances.  Of named lovers, present and past; of lost places and friends.  Their tenor like wildly coherent ramblings before a dawn soaked in whiskey, moral fatigue, and that perpetual revisionism of questions to large to have answers.  Just as the certainty of that night’s end, of seasons’ close and return, relentlessly, they know their lights and our respective ghosts will cycle until they all go finally out.  Their triumph is an ability to exist in this light’s gloaming.  They both love and hate our facile pop-culture of plastic cathedrals, giving them a big-and-bloody hug.  As poet, Scott stands before these weird houses of worship with a cup of flame, wishing to burn them wholly but unable to, attached to a preexisting fire: his petite anarchy of the mind.  Here everything burns.  They acknowledge an ash to come, and in this allow a myriad of characters and voices appearing and reappearing, to speak, while sparing none the inevitably futile whisper preceding oblivion.  In their spell these verses provide solace in the idea that, as we pass from our tiny lives into the void, there is a collective union, just as when we lived, in our ceasing forever to do so.  And like a “soft inhale of wind” they accept memory’s transience: ours, and the world of us entire."