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 (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.