Fuse / Fracture: Poems (2001-2021)

These are hymns and elegies; protest songs and battle cries as Jones speaks to and for the disaffected: ‘We are the tapestry / The crackling cracks of modernity / Dislocated desperations stitched together / By the disparate verses of our skin / I write therefore we exist / We exist therefore i write / And from this page this scream.’

In this new anniversary edition some of the poems - like his popular, ever-evolving ‘the guerilla tapestry’ - have been reworked for 2021, taking in the contemporary concerns of Brexit, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Yes Cymru, food banks, asylum seekers and zero hour workers. 28 new poems turn their gaze to the personal, covering grief and loss, broken trust and marriage, betrayal and forgiveness, haunted by ghosts of both the living and the dead. An inventory of scars where love once lived.

fuse / fracture also includes a selection of poems from his other publications over the past two decades: Darkness is Where the Stars Are (Cinnamon Press, 2008), The Aspirations of Poverty (Red Poets Press, 2017) and My Bright Shadow (Rough Trade Books, 2020) as well as some of his lyrics from James Dean Bradfield’s recent album Even in Exile (BMG Music Publishing, 2020