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.FOTO:FORTEPAN / Kölcsey Ferenc Dunakeszi Városi Könyvtár / Petanovics fényképek, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
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Greetings:
…..“Community Bookshelf” is a twice-yearly space where writers who have been published on Jerry Jazz Musician can share news about their recently authored books and/or recordings.
…..This edition includes information about books published within the last six months or so, and is limited to those who submitted their news by the edition’s publication deadline.
…..The books are listed alphabetically by writer. All book descriptions, biographies, and photos were submitted by the writers. Click on the author’s name under the book cover to be taken to pages where their work has been published on Jerry Jazz Musician.
…..I anticipate the next edition will be in the spring of 2024. Please get in touch with me as soon as possible if you expect to have a book published between September, 2023 and March, 2024, and would like to be included in “Community Bookshelf, #2”
…..Thanks for reading, and for supporting those who contribute their work to Jerry Jazz Musician.
Joe Maita
Editor/Publisher
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Defying Extinction, by Amy Barone
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…..Defying Extinction is a collection of 61 poems that pay homage to survivors of all genres—animal, object, spirit, place, the arts, the human heart. Barone was moved by Italy’s disappearing brown bears, the endangered Great Barrier Reef, victims of New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911, her late mother’s charm bracelet, and a vanishing analog world, among other influences. Witty and colorful, the poems shine with hope and resignation, underscoring the essence of remembering and then moving on.
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A poem from the book:
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Piano Echoes
We stream music and view YouTube.
Outgrew our stereos and CDs.
They had tune-smiths at their pianos
playing rollicking sounds.
Music filled the alleys of New York’s West 28th Street.
Father of the Blues J. C. Handy and Scott Joplin wrote
catchy songs there in the early 1900s.
Ragtime and jazz poured from saloons and halls.
Where “In the Good Old Summertime”
and “Give My Regards to Broadway” were born.
A universal language took root.
Walls to show biz success fell.
America’s sheet music trade thrived.
When in a good mood, my late father used to sing around the house.
He’d belt out, “Hello! Ma Baby,” an old song to a young girl
who loved rock music, who knew little of Tin Pan Alley’s past splendor.
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Order the book by clicking here
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In addition to Broadstone Books publishing Defying Extinction, New York Quarterly Books published Amy Barone’s book We Became Summer in 2018. She also wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing). She belongs to the Poetry Society of America and the brevitas online poetry community that celebrates the short poem. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City. Twitter: @AmyBBarone
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Broken Glosa: an alphabet book of post-avant glosa
by Stephen Bett
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…..Stephen Bett’s father took him to sit, age 15 and starting out in poetry, at the feet of his father’s friend P.K. Page, the doyenne of Canadian poetry, who later revived the “glosa” in Canada. Bett’s new book, his 25th, in a sense brings it all back home. Broken Glosa takes the “glosa,” a Renaissance Spanish Court form, and breaks it down to its contemporary essentials―fractured forms for fractured times―riffing on postmodernist and post-avant poets in ways that are as surprising and inventive as they are richly textured. This book plays out Stephen Bett’s lifetime in North American and British avant-garde poetry, taking the measure of 67 postmodernist poets.
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A poem from the book:
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Jack Spicer: No One Listens to Poetry
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop.
……………………• • •
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
Language―Jack Spicer (with nods to Robin Blaser)
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No one listens to poetry. The ocean
rolls over us ― these coastal people
nothing’s out beyond this last gasp edge
serial decoder of breakers
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
drip drip on little green transceivers, whatever
comes in from that darkness around us
you were the real outsider, honest angel
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
jolts or jive, so okay dictate something, anything…
Nothing, you said, Deserves to live
& I heard that, crystal clear
One listens to poetry.
It’s difficult to get the news
No one listens to radio anymore,
not even Martians
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 25 books in print. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com
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Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems, by Daniel Brown
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…..Daniel Brown is a retired Special Education teacher who began writing poetry as a senior. In January 2023 at the age of 72, he published his first collection, Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems, a celebration of family history that combines treasured family photographs with poetic interpretations. Using family portraits, it reaches beyond casual images to follow the path between generations and highlights the joy, humor, tragedy and resilience of seemingly ordinary life. An additional section features poems set to portraits of jazz musicians by the late artist and Jazz enthusiast Al Summ.
…..The genesis of the collection is the author’s interest in Ekphrastic poetry which he felt lent itself to unique family images compiled from his study of genealogy. Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems is published by Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY.
…..Some poems in the book have been published in Jerry Jazz Musician.
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A poem from the book:
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Brothers (9/1/23)
………….(For Cynthia Winika and Linnea Brown)
–Wool flat caps
buttoned collars
tight to the chin
for a warm late summer outing
left with autumn dusk, 1923
–not brothers laughing
in boats–
boats that drift life
from one point to
another–
water following
it’s special path
ignoring cameras
that blink for a second
at three brother’s laughing–
–resting
on a piano
a century later.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Daniel Brown
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To Dance on the Ugly, by Susie Gharib
…..To Dance on the Ugly is a collection of a hundred and twenty-three English poems, published by Impspired Magazine in 2022. The book bears the title of a poem inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. Most poems were written during the long-running Syrian war, in difficult conditions, and were already published by thirty-three international, literary magazines and reviews.
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A poem from the book:
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To Dance on the Ugly
“Jinny always dances in the hall on the ugly”.
………….Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I abhor everything that Jinny stands for,
her casual sex and promiscuous lore,
but I must admit she animates the book
with her billowing frocks and opening doors
and from her I learnt despite my scorn
to dance on the ugly, and dance for long.
In curfew darkness, I scribbled odes
by the haggard light of a famished globe,
a candle’s orb.
The rattle that Wilfred Owen deplored
in an anthem meant to disparage wars
now live assaults my metaphors,
who, unscathed, tap-dance a rhythm of their own.
And deaths that queued before my abode,
that abducted whoever I adored,
bequeathed an inheritance of fortitude,
of resurrection from every plight and woe,
a new-born soul.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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…..Susie Gharib is also the author of three film scripts, adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, published by Impspired Magazine. She is a university lecturer, who undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Her doctoral thesis is a study of the work of D.H. Lawrence. Many of her poems reflect her experiences in both the United Kingdom and the Middle East.
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Singing in the Dark, by Arya F. Jenkins
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…..My fourth poetry chapbook, Singing in the Dark, combines confessional themes with poems about causes, and includes “When (A Melody for Jazz),” a poem featured in Jerry Jazz Musician in 2022. This poetry collection, published by Alien Buddha Press in November 2022, was inspired by the idea catalyzed by the pandemic that out of darkness comes light. Although some of the poems concern dark subject matter — war or loss, for example — the sense of transcendence and love surmounting all prevail. The painting on the cover is mine and was included in a show at the Hoyt Museum of Art in New Castle, Penn. a few years ago.
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A poem from the book:
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Mothers’ Cry
…..(For Jayland Walker)
Again police pull triggers too soon
Too readily
Another mother loses her son
Add another Black name to the long bulleted list
Another name once flesh and blood
Once had a voice
Once asked why
Once laughed and wept with
Understanding and regret
That was human too
Mothers count their slain children at night
They cannot sleep
Silence does not move them to pray and
Sirens do not let them recover from
Their unabated sorrow.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Arya F. Jenkins is a Colombian-American poet and writer and the author of four poetry chapbooks, a short story collection, Blue Songs in an Open Key (Fomite Press), and a novel, Punk Disco Bohemian (NineStar Press). Singing in the Dark was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2022.
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Tarantula Season and Other Poems, by DB Jonas
…..In Tarantula Season and Other Poems, DB Jonas provides us with an inspirational sequence of lyrical and narrative meditations on the nature of meaning, the irreducible strangeness of artistic expression, the inexhaustible richness of the natural world, and the perversity of time. Taking inspiration from sources both ancient and modern, the intimate musicality of these poems ushers us gently into the complex weavings of thought and reintroduces us to the enduring seductions of the English language: the paradoxically “lush austerities of our mother tongue.” Tarantula Season will be issued on November 10th 2023 by Finishing line Press, available for purchase on Amazon.
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A poem from the book:
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Perverse Practice
So it may be that God’s word was distraction / Which
to our strange type appears destruction / Which is bitter.
Malcolm Lowry, Strange Type
Enough said if you please
of how the artful poet will unleash
the latent potencies of speech
awake precisions dormant
in the mighty tongue and find
the strength to speak in terms
that common talk cannot.
Have you not seen instead
how hapless words accumulate
around the nameless reticence
that haunts our crafted speaking
to stammer past our sovereign intent
in hot pursuit of what lies mute,
the always otherness of meaning?
Perhaps it is instead the case
that the wandering voice of poems
calls to what lies always weakest
in the word, the inability of speech
to only say precisely what it means
and nothing more, and never fails
to signify far more than it is able.
So if poetry unleashes something
harbored in the words, perhaps
it’s not a matter of some latent
power there or vivid insight which
an efficacious eloquence supplies,
but an urgency no speech can silence,
an entreaty to which every verse replies.
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DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. After several Wanderjahre in Spain, France and Italy, he studied philosophy and literature at the Universities of California and Padova, and earned postgraduate degrees at Princeton and Yale. Following his retirement from a long career in business and the sciences, he returned to the practice of poetry. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution and others.
For more details, and to purchase the book, please click here
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Jazz Lines Spoken: CD companion to Jazz Lines…free verse in the key of jazz, by Gloria Krolak
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…..“You can’t copyright the title to a song and jazz writer Gloria Krolak makes maximum use of that fact with her book Jazz Lines…free verse in the key of jazz,” wrote Tony Mottola, long-time editor of Jersey Jazz, the journal of the New Jersey Jazz Society, in his review of Jazz Lines. “The author has collected more than 1000 titles of jazz standards and thematically combined them into verses that evoke the spirit, moods and rhythms of jazz.”
…..Krolak and composer/vibraphonist Steve Yeager have chosen 15 of her verses from the book, set them to music and recorded them on Jazz Lines Spoken. Yeager sets the mood while Krolak gives the poems their voice. Adding cleverness to ingenuity, the book and CD make a perfect duo.
…..Jazz Lines, the book, was originally published in 2018, receiving recognition from W. Royal Stokes as “most significant for members of the Jazz Journalists Association to know of.” Stokes was a founding member of the organization.
…..Vibraphonist Anthony Smith found it “erudite and playful,” and Denise Friday of Local Life, SC magazine wrote, “The poems will stir memories of your favorite songs, while the images will bring the musical experience to life.”
…..Jazz Lines Spoken is available at http://gloriajazz.com, and is included free with the purchase of Jazz Lines, the book.
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Host of radio’s Good Vibes for 14 years, Gloria Krolak now hosts “Mornin’ Gloria” on WEFT, South Bend, Indiana. Her book, Jazz Lines, is composed of poems built with jazz tune titles. She has also used jazz albums as her building blocks. Close-up photography is one of her passions. The author’s favorite spots are the beach and The Jazz Corner, annually voted one of Downbeat’s best clubs.
Visit her website by clicking here
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Jigsaw Puzzle in a Vortex, (A Collection of Memoirs), by Aurora M. Lewis
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…..This is Aurora M. Lewis’ second collection, self-published under BetteJay Publishing. It was released on Amazon as a paperback on April 20, 2023. The book is a memoir in poems, essays and family photos depicting her life thus far. The 29 poems and 12 essays cover subjects such as family, friends, sexual harassment, rape, racism, and physical and mental health. All these pieces were written between 2008 to 2022.
…..In telling her truth and sharing her stories, her mission is to inspire others, regardless of race or gender (but particularly Black women), to know they are not alone as they struggle through the complexities, tragedies, and joys of life. Her book cover was designed by her 18-year-old granddaughter, Ahni Domonique Hurst.
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A poem from the book:
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Puzzle Pieces
I cried for no reason, contemplating the meaning of life because I thought there was none as I searched for the missing pieces to push into place and make my puzzle whole, but the pieces were lost to me as I crawled about the floor, my hands outstretched feeling my way through the darkness of my depression. Then, like Alice, I was handed a pill to make my inner pain small and the sense of who I am large enough for me to see through the looking glass that the world was not a grey place enclosed in fog, but a wonderland where sunshine warms my face, moonbeams dance on calm seas, orange blossoms perfume the air, and thoughts of those I love bring a smile to my face as I watch the lost pieces to my puzzle fall gently into my palm and the mocking grin of the Cheshire cats fading away.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Aurora M. Lewis retired from the Finance Industry in 2009 after working for 40 years. She graduated from UCLA Creative Writing, General Studies with Honors, at the age of 59. Aurora has over 250 poems, essays, and short stories published in several notable journals. She self-published her first book, Jazz Poems, reflections on a broken heart at age 71. She is now 73 with aspirations to publish two more books.
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Rhapsodies in Blue, by Sean Murphy
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…..Rhapsodies in Blue (Kelsay Books, published 2/28/23) is the second installment of a large and ongoing project that explores America (its mythology, its possibility) through a series of poems that function as biography, history, and cultural commentary. Continuing where The Blackened Blues left off, this collection honors a variety of artistic icons, some well-known, others unjustly obscure, and seeks to capture something essential about their lives, bearing witness while paying homage.
…..America has always been a cauldron of inconsistencies; so often in our history we’ve ended up with brilliance, tolerance, and progress only after every other option has been exhausted. It seems instructive—and inspiring—to consider that, to take only one from many other examples, this country, which beats and stymies its best citizens, is capable of producing the geniuses who invented and perfected jazz and blues music. Despite every systemic disadvantage and all the obstacles placed in their paths, these musicians lived, played, persevered, and became immortal. Any country that can claim Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Howlin’ Wolf is worth preserving, and celebrating.
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A poem from the book:
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52nd Street’s Story
(During the decades of the 1930s through the 1950s, New York City’s 52nd Street was the center of the jazz universe, with clubs where bebop legends like Charlie “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk regularly performed)
A Bird blew through 52nd St. bringing sounds
you could see. It’s not other colors, not yet.
This was still black & white on every level—
but deeper, darker; murky becoming clear.
Like how Eskimos have so many words
for snow; artists, too, know there’s no limit
on finding ways to say the same thing, different
but beautiful. More: they must find new strategies
to sing these songs; this is how language and ideas
get found. Those who can hear what they’re seeing
carve out a path, not bringing light to the night
so much as making the blacks blanker and the whites
brighter—the way the sky dances into becoming
clear and small in unthinkable darkness—lit and defined
by stars glowing in space, themselves impossible to see
without the absence of light that causes them to shine:
the sound of science creating new life out of nothing.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” as well as in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his chapbook, The Blackened Blues, is now available from Finishing Line Press. To learn more, visit seanmurphy.net
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10,000 Words, by John Riley
…..My new book of a hundred 100-word prose poems titled 10,000 Words was published in April 2023 by EXOT Books in New York. The book’s cover design uses stones to visually develop one of the book’s main themes. This is my first collection, although I have published widely as both a poet and a writer of fiction.
…..The inherent tension between poetry and prose is one of the forces brewing in 10,000 Words. As John Marcus Powell writes about my book, “[a]s with Samuel Beckett, words and phrases and sentences are pools–and the complete 100-word poem is the largest pool, inviting us to jump in, then swim or tread water, at our whim.” By the use of clear imagery, sounds that cleave and sing to each other, and a resolution that flows into questions that open into new resolutions, 10,000 is a realization that only mysteries are endless.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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John Riley has published poetry in Mojave River Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Connotation Press, Dead Mule, Better Than Starbucks and many other journals and anthologies. He works in educational publishing part-time and is a full-time nanny to his granddaughter Byl.
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Deep Breath, by Josie Rozell
…..Deep Breath (2023), a collection of thirty-one American sonnets and over fifty hand-cut surrealist collages published by Ambitious Stories, follows the traditions of Wanda Coleman, John Ashbery and Terrance Hayes. Written while cycling alone up the west coast of the United States and finished while living in Hawai’i, these poems contemplate a human’s place in an expanding (and receding) environment, from the oceans to the forests to the cosmos – and the inspired breath that accompanies all of life.
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A poem from the book:
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Stella in the Starlight
Stella sticks her toes in the grass
and she don’t know the impact—
the moonlight bending on the bowing blades of grass
casting long shadows like tracks
I follow her, relaxed.
Stella don’t know her impact.
She lifts the cup to her lips to drink
and sets it tender on the forest floor—
shadow roses bloom underneath
I take one and smell one and it smells like
hot caramel on a skillet in the softest of winter blues.
Stella don’t know her own tact.
When she walks she makes the wind
that blows the snow dust from the trees
to swirl around like cotton
in the springtime.
The night is an electric blanket
with Stella in the starlight.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Josie Rozell writes to the long-notes of Nina & Billie and salts the stanzas with a little Davis. She is the author of two collections of poetry and hand-cut collage: Articulated Soul (2021) and Deep Breath (2023). More of her work can be found at https://josierozell.wixsite.
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VIper Brain, by John L. Stanizzi
…..Viper Brain came unexpectedly. Reading about vipers, I learned that Gaboon Vipers, found in rainforests and savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, are fascinating, gorgeous, and deadly. Up to six feet long and with fangs approaching two inches, the Gaboon is not to be trifled with. Also known by other names- butterfly adder, whisper, swampjack, I instantly saw the connection – poetic and ironic. My new poems are darker than usual, and Viper Brain felt like a perfect fit. Poets are always hunting for our next dose of sustenance, our poems. Likewise, Gaboon is always hunting its next prey. Hence, the correlation, and the birth of my next book. The wonderful jacket is the creation of my publisher at Main Street Rag, Scott Douglass. Big thanks, Scott.
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A poem from the book:
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Vacancy
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis
when night was all there was
you chose it
it was adequate
because there was nothing else-
enemies………….. friends-
even strangers for that matter
whether their gift was flight
or perhaps the erratic deeds of lovers
the ones who thrust with hatred
or glide without a sound …………..feigning joy
soon enough they rose with you as your plane climbed
into the late sky and none of it mattered
it couldn’t
all that remained was another layer of darkness.
where are you?
where will you ever be?
without night
it is darker,
and even now,
years and years
after your departure
I can still see the
beacon lights flashing under your wings
way off in the distance
moving you farther and farther away
but in fact, you’re not moving at all-
I don’t think
your anti-collision lights
have broken apart
and are in flight- all sharp swords,
the bent bows,
the trouble of war
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John L. Stanizzi/author of twelve collections, including his newest –Feathers and Bones. Easy to find online — American Life in Poetry, Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, and many, many others. Former Etherington Scholar/Wesleyan University. His non-fiction story, Pants, was named best creative non-fiction piece for 2022. In 2021, John received a Fellowship in Creative Writing/Non-Fiction from the Connecticut Department of Creativity, Culture, and Diversity. His non-fiction is very widely published. A Former Professor of English at Manchester Community College, John lives in Coventry, CT with his wife Carol.
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Driftwood, by Henry Wolstat
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…..Driftwood is a compilation of my poems that have been written over many years. It was published in 2022 by Kelsay Press. The topics vary from music and other arts to running, baseball, travel and aging.
…..With music, there has been an emphasis on jazz which I have been following for over 70 years. Baseball has kept my attention since I first saw Jackie Robinson in Toronto. Running covers my over 50 years of running distances from the mile to marathons. And as I approach my 90th year, age and relationships are definitely on my mind.
…..Most of my poems are short and free form with several pages of haikus.
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A poem from the book:
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Lady Day and Prez
Sitting at the bar
Of the Towne Tavern,
Once Toronto’s finest jazz bar,
Sipping my one beer.
Knowing even then,
In my twenty-third year,
I was witness to a
Never forgotten gig.
Lady Day, how every note
You sang rang out
With the blues and
The rhythm of your
Battered and celebrated life.
And you, Prez, in your
Pork pie hat blew
Sounds that resonated
In my memory years later.
You both were wasted,
Facing death within a year.
But you’re both very
Much alive in my soul.
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Order the book via Amazon by clicking here
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Henry Wolstat is a retired psychiatrist in his late 80’s living in the greater Boston area with his wife. In addition to writing Driftwood he has been published in both printed anthologies and online. He is passionate about running, the arts, and poetry.
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