Dope Calisthenics
by Sylvia Jones
Sylvia Jones's sophomore collection examines the pressure exerted on working-class Black life by spectacle, debt, inheritance, and the market's endless demand for performance. The poems move through Baltimore, television, retail language, protest remnants, and borrowed speech, tracking how public feeling hardens into product and how survival becomes a style others learn to consume. Class aspiration and class entrapment, the theater of mobility, and the material afterlife of slogans once the moment of display has passed all loom large as Jones asks what kind of consciousness repetition makes, and what remains when the shift ends and the bill arrives?
Dope Calisthenics is a book about the psychic drills required to live inside scarcity while being told to call it possibility instead.
Sylvia Jones
SYLVIA JONES (b. 1994) is the author of Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024). She serves as poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press and is a senior reader for the journal Ploughshares. Her writing can be found in Smartish Pace, American Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Common Place Poetics, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, Strange Hymnal, R&R, Mountaineers Books, and elsewhere. Jones lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland, with her partner, writer and translator Agata Ambrozewicz, and their buff tabby cat, Theo.