Community Bookshelf #3

Gordon Parks’ portrait of the author Richard Wright; New York, 1943

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.

…..All book descriptions, biographies, and photos were submitted by the writers with only minimal editing. 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 2025. Please get in touch with me as soon as possible if you expect to have a book published between September, 2024 and March, 2025, and would like to be included in “Community Bookshelf, #4”

…..Thanks for reading, and for supporting those who contribute their work to Jerry Jazz Musician.

Joe Maita

Editor/Publisher

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Too Short to Box with God, by Matthew Johnson (Finishing Line Press)

…..This is my third poetry collection and my first chapbook. This is a collection that draws on the vast history of one of the world’s oldest sports to both celebrate and reflect on the sweet science of boxing and the fighters who have not only dedicated their lives to the fight, but have embodied cultural and socio-political importance that goes beyond the ring. Ranging from the works of ancient literature, such as Homer’s Iliad and The Bible, to towering and transcendent fighters like Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, Too Short to Box with God examines how boxing, across time, has intersected with entertainment, literature, politics, race, and religion.

A poem from the book:

The Night Joe Louis Defeated Max Schmeling

When Joe Louis won the Fight of the Century,
And the evening fell like Max Schmeling,
There was a ring shout everywhere in Black America,
And it resonated like the music of hearing John Henry pounding his hammer,
Or Josh Gibson sending a curveball into the atmosphere.

Surging out into the evening, everywhere, were black people,
Like moths from out the Full Moon.

Juneteenth extended long into another day in the heart of Texas.
The jazzmen in Harlem and the bluesmen of Beale Street
Spilled out from their venues to blow and strum their songs,
And Sunday School teachers, way down in Dixie,
Were glad to have made the spectacle a requirement for their students.

After centuries where the occasions
To lift their black arms in celebration had been far too rare,
Joe Louis, some parents’ black child, was being cheered by everyone,
And was now not just the strongest man in the world,
But in America, where the black strength of so many had been cut down…

Matthew Johnson is the author of the poetry collections, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books), Far from New York State (NYQ Press), and the recently released chapbook, Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The African American Review, Delta Poetry Review, Front Porch Review, London Magazine, Quarter Press, Roanoke Review, and elsewhere. Recipient of Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, he’s the managing editor ofThe Portrait of New England and poetry editor of The Twin Bill.

Click here to visit his website

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Jake and the Hobo: My Summer of Love, by Namaya (Vermont Art Poetry Press)

…..This has been an eight year journey from concept to this final publication. The novel, a unique coming-of-age story, follows the journey of a 16-year-old girl, Jake Meadows. Fleeing her impoverished coal mining town in West Virginia, she meets Erasmus P. Hobbs, a gentle and wise veteran, and his dog Socrates. Erasmus, a Good Samaritan, hobo philosopher, jack of all trades, recovering alcoholic, and Vietnam veteran with Agent Orange disease, travels the USA with his black and white cocker spaniel Socrates. Their chariot is a yellow Airstream RV called Emma Goldman, with a picture of the famous revolutionary dancing on the side and her quote, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” The book is a poignant exploration of forgiveness, transformation, and the celebration of courage as Jake and Erasmus embark on self-discovery and healing.

…..Adventures, tenderness, and surprises abound in this fast-paced novel. Their odyssey takes them through Cleveland and down to a Buddhist retreat called Dignity Village. They meet the Zen master, Roshi Konji, a Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret captain, a recovering alcoholic, and the leader of Dignity Village. Jake meets Sojourner, an herbalist and healer, who becomes her godmother. As they travel down to New Orleans to a homeless shelter, they encounter hobos, wanderers, refugees, and the heroes and angels who help people of all kinds.

…..While written with a young adult audience in mind, the novel also resonates with adult readers. It celebrates the diversity that can be found in the people and regions of the United States without shying away from exploring the darkness that is both a part of the country’s history and still lingers today. An exploration of what it means to come of age in a world filled with both unimaginable love and incredible hardship, the novel tracks the self-development of a young girl and the experiences that shape her. The plot is an innovative take on classic American road trip novels with a contemporary perspective.

…..Embark on this extraordinary journey with Jake and the Hobo: My Summer of Love. Join them as they traverse the diverse landscapes of the United States, meet a cast of unique characters, and discover the transformative power of love and forgiveness.

Namaya is an internationally renowned Jazz poet, storyteller, humorist and sublime improvisational artist. He has performed throughout the US and has toured in Europe, New Zealand, Japan, Asia, the Americas and Palmyra Syria. Both as a solo artist, with his band the Jazz Beat Blues Poetry Ensemble, and with jazz musicians around the world, Namaya performs an astonishing blend of jazz word, story and improvisation.

Visit his website by clicking here

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MONARCH: Stories, by Emily Jon Tobias (Black Lawrence Press)
.

…..MONARCH: Stories subverts the reader’s common perceptions about how love can heal, how loss and suffering can transform, and how every character deserves a second chance. America’s city scars, sewers, alleyways, and bars are landscape to their wars, as characters heal and transform under wind turbines and on open roads, in golden cornfields and with the wails of Chicago blues. Heroes in this collection are the marginalized, the sufferers, the down-trodden, the misfits, the wanderers, and the wounded, shaped by grief but not defined by their scars.

…..Honoring the human capacity for change, characters drive the collection, turning up the dial to raise the volume of voice for those who live on the fringe and are often ignored. In collection, MONARCH is an exploration of the human condition through a lens of damaged survivors as they learn to love through small acts of kindness, given and received. Characters bear traumas with their bodies, and often, they transgress. They break in, break down, and ultimately, break open.

…..An inclusive invitation, MONARCH aims at an intimate portrayal of scarred characters on American streets beating the drum of current culture against the fierce rhythm of critical social justice issues. With this at its heart, the collection Includes a reading guide written by the author with prompts intended to inspire discourse between readers, writers, and students, making the work of special interest to librarians, teachers, book clubs, and beyond.

(Foreword by Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas).

Emily Jon Tobias is an American author and poet. She is an award-winning writer whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, along with other honorable mentions, and has been featured in literary journals such as Santa Clara Review, Talking River Review, Flying South Literary Journal, Furrow Literary Journal, The Opiate Magazine, The Ocotillo Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Big Muddy, Spoon Knife, Peauxdunque Review, and elsewhere. Midwestern-raised, she now lives and writes on the coast of Southern California and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University Oregon. MONARCH: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) is her debut collection.

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Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World, by Tim Tomlinson (Nirala Publications)

…..Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World is a hybrid collection of poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, memoir, and prose poetry. The book draws on my experiences as a scuba diver beginning in the mid-1970s, when the biodiversity and superabundance of marine life was dense enough to appear impervious to the careless indifference and reckless exploitation of mankind, up to the present moment, with more than two-thirds of the world’s reefs destroyed, and the entire ecosystem on the brink of extinction.

About the collection, celebrated Indian poet Arundhathi Subramiam writes: . “This book is an homage, a requiem, an appeal, but above all, a tender and compelling invitation to strangeness – and deeper listening. In witnessing ‘the magisterial stillness of the barracuda’ and the many eyes that look at you looking at them in ‘a deep Rothko-blue sea’, it becomes a tribute to deeper forms of kinship and non-transactional ways of inhabiting the universe. Here’s a luminous anthem to an exhilarating and terrifying parallel world. And a crash course in learning to live with ‘no agenda but awe.’”

A poem from the collection:

all men are created equal
not all fish
but all fish have dignity
not all men

Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the story collection This Is Not Happening to You. He has lived in the Bahamas, China, England, Italy, the Philippines, Thailand, and various cities in the US, including New Orleans, Boston, Miami, and New York City. He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.

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Eating Haiku, by Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

…..Eating haiku is Barbara Anna Gaiardoni’s second microchap published in the Origami Poems Project by Editor Jan Keough.

…..It contains six haiku in English also translated into Italian language. A little book that accompanies our thoughts, an intimate gesture, a moment of contemplation, a peaceful emotion to discover the relationship with nature through direct experience and favored observation of environment.

…..Cover was designed by Andrea Vanacore, visionary photographer and filmmaker with a long and varied experience.

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni is winner of the First Prize 2023 “Zheng Nian Cup” National Literature Price and of the Edinburgh “Writings Leith” contest. She received a nomination for the Touchstone Award 2023. Her Japanese-style poems has been published in one hundred and seventeen international journals.

Click here to visit her website.

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Patterns on the Wall, by D.H. Jenkins

…..Patterns on the Wall (Kelsay Books) is a book of ekphrastic, nature, and jazz poems. This is my first book of poems.

“Patterns on the Wall brings Jenkins’ poetic magic to the page where a tenor sax is moaning through a Jamaican eve, a night train steams through a European winter, and Picasso’s ‘Melancholy Woman’ sits in blue tones. DH Jenkins: constant traveller and world’s poet.”

-Bill Scholer, Artist, Musician, Filmmaker

A poem from the book:

Sketches of Spain or Guernica

The earth has got a fever of 103, and I’ve
found Langston Hughes languishing
on the sidewalks of NYC.

Piano keys were dancing in the wind;
Thelonious Monk was bluer than blue,
his slouch hat rolling to Timbuktu.

Picasso made cubist portraits of his lovers,
Man Ray took surreal pictures of them too;
Lester Young played in dim lit Paris clubs.

And the Sketches of Spain are always playing
just as the picture of Guernica always hangs
in the galleries of our collective minds.

As I smoked a cigarette w/ Gregory Corso
and talked to Allen Ginsberg about Blake,
I felt that everything would be okay, for

somewhere a trumpeter is blowing cool,
somewhere a sax player plays the moon
just like Black Orpheus played his lute.

D H Jenkins’ poems have appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician, The Tiger Moth Review, Global South, and Kelp Journal–2024 Ocean Anthology. For many years he was a professor of Speech and Writing for UMUC-Asia, living and working in Japan and Korea. He now lives in New Zealand and enjoys hiking in the Southern Alps as well as scuba diving and snorkeling in the Pacific Islands.

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Coral in the Diaspora by Jerrice J. Baptiste [Abode Press]

….. Coral in The Diaspora by Jerrice J. Baptiste is a collection that captures the lives of the Haitian people as they embrace the goodness in their community. It celebrates the wisdom of the elders as leaders who are cherished for their commitment to help the island thrive. Each member of the island’s community is welcomed and valued for their special gifts and the joy they each create by being unique souls. Coral in The Diaspora creates a visceral experience for its readers through its colorful imagery and beautiful language by giving voice to the island of Haiti.

A poem from the book:

Gathering

Godmother cuts fabric
on the wooden table. I reach
to grab fringe floating in air. Color of rose
and green pastels. I live in the sound of
her foot pushing pedal in cadence.

My head leans in, over her shoulder
as two pieces of silk are sewn together.
The floor vibrates. Godmother hums along
to French songs playing on a vinyl record.

We’re surrounded by iridescent dresses
in the sewing room. Thread filaments
in sunray dance. Godmother holds
gold thread and needle to hem.

Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet born in Haiti, and the author of eight books. Her poetry has been published and forthcoming in Urthona: Buddhism & Art, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & The Arts, Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, Poetica Review, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, The Caribbean Writer. Jerrice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2024 by Jerry Jazz Musician; as Best of the Net for 2022 by Blue Stem. Her poetry and collaborative song-writing are on the Grammy award nominated album- Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti.

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As We Cover Ourselves With Light, by Sandra Rivers-Gill [Sheila-Na-Gig Editions]

….The collection confronts challenging themes surrounding family, culture, and social injustice.

A poem from the book:

Ain’t Nothing Like Family

At the table we plant our hips,
spread roots deep into the soil,
gather and grow bony plates
from country fried chatter.
Something good
is always cooking.
The gospel of generous dessert
spoons our appetites
heaped all over hallelujahs.
It tests our mettle,
stirs up a season of wait;
gives us a bold flavor to chew.
We ask for second helpings,
because we thirst for more
than pot liquor and cornbread.
Family is like leftover stew,
hearty as God’s honest truth.
It’s what Mama places on the table.
Before our prayers rise up
we come together —
churn homemade ice cream.
We are a culture of ripened fruit
consuming what is not always easy.
We learn to appreciate our fullness —
savor our sweet and spice.
On our tongues we crave living water;
well done like ribs on a summer grill
perfected in the smoke of fire.
We are marinated in love,
seasoned with salt for our journey.

Sandra Rivers-Gill is a poet, performer and playwright. Her poetry has been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as a judge for poetry competitions, poetry workshop facilitator, teaching artist for drama ministries, treatment facilities and senior residence communities. She currently serves as a teaching artist for Creative Aging Ohio administered through the Ohio Arts Council. Her debut poetry collection, As We Cover Ourselves With Light, was selected as a finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

Click here for more information.

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That Infinite Roar, by Laurie Kuntz

…..This is my 6th poetry book. If I had to pick one word to describe the work in my new book, That Infinite Roar, I would say, epiphanies – it is about that life light bulb going off and offering realizations to the quotidian: aging relationships, parenting, friendship, sisterhood, and living in concert with nature. The title itself suggests an announcement of light, love, acceptance, and all the light bulb moments we are fortunate to witness and to be a part of.

…..When I choreographed the poems, I tried to have the poems be in concert with each other. For example, the poems in the first section of the book, which is introduced by an epigraph by Gena Showalter, “A whisper can become a roar,” focuses on poems about the roar of growing and sharing life experiences with a partner. The second section, which opens with the epigraph by Mary Oliver, “I have my way of praying as you no doubt have yours,” includes poems that deal with relationships with sisters, friends, family, and a partnership with the world. The third section of the book opens with another epigraph from Oliver, “The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting;” the poems in this section are mainly about mothering in all of her stipulated definitions. And, the final section with the epigraph by Mandelstam, “I sense the spreading of a wing,” are poems offering hope and light and empathy.

A poem from the book

Old Married Couple Cutting Watermelon

There are some things
we just don’t do well together.
I am not your tennis partner.
There are some mountains you climb alone.
I cannot sing while you tune your guitar.
But, we have learned the rhythm of
a couple with a cleaver.

We both know how to check for ripeness.
A lawn green skin with a yellow sun
bursting at its center.
An ear to the rind,
checking for the sea caught in a shell sound.

At home, we prepare the counter
find a balance so the orb does not roll,
fill containers with a ruby red squares
that will quench our aging thirst.

One July day, while you napped
the temperature grew thick
as a watermelon skin.
Alone in the kitchen, I tackled the green ball
with a serrated edge,
found the sweet spot on the counter
to conquer the roll, sliced the fruit
in halves and quarters until tins were glowing
with squares looking like polished gems.

What I thought was a job for two,
I could do by myself–
handle a knife, square a slice, dispose of rinds,
fill a bowl that only I would gorge from,
a selfish appetite quenched.

Alone, in the kitchen,
I picked the ripest pieces,
but the juices did not burst,
nor run over my tongue
with the same coupled sweetness.

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She has published six books of poetry. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.

Click here to visit her website

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Roller Coasters Made of Dream Space, by Peter J. Dellolio [Cyberwit.net]

…..This is my third published book of poetry. The poetry in Roller Coasters Made Of Dream Space continues my obsession with Surrealism. I have been influenced by some of the New York School poets such as John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch.

A poem from the book:

Muscularity Diary

muscularity
diary shouting insults
into Larry’s tool chest
……..but you should take it easy
……..Larry
……..there was sufficient
……..clarity in the clarinet
……..box

……..quintet jackass fuse
……..a short temper
…….flaws in the animal’s jaws

mendacity
quarry mounting rivets
give us the sunset
ride the lorry

sometimes toothpick
stem fumbling creates
God music in a
red experiment room
use antique railroad lanterns
to search for Larry because
he’s as thin as an air shaft

breeze

Peter J. Delollio’s poetry, prose-poems, fiction, short plays, art work, and critical essays have been published in over 80 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. Two other poetry collections: A Box Of Crazy Toys [Xenos Books/Chelsea Editions, 2018] and Bloodstream Is An Illusion Of Rubies Counting Fireplaces [2023]. His paintings and 3D works offer abstract images of famous people in all walks of life who have died tragically at a young age. He lives in Brooklyn.

Click here to go to his website

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the little book of e, by e. ethelbert miller

…..In the little book of e, poet E. Ethelbert Miller embraces the Japanese poetic form of haiku to comment on our contemporary world. Written during the pandemic, Miller’s poems follow in the tradition of Basho and Richard Wright. the little book of e is a collaboration with translator Rafi Ellenson. Haiku presented in English and Hebrew is symbolic of how language can bring people together. Miller and Ellenson have given us a book that shows how Black and Jewish relations can continue to be a beacon of hope. This book is filled with words that blossom like flowers.

A poem from the book:

# 14

yes a love supreme
Coltrane places horn to lips
beauty out of man

Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller is Associate Editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Miller’s latest book is How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask, published by City Point Press.

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To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction (short stories), and Words on the Page (a novella), by Zary Fekete

…..Whether you realize it or not, you have seen them around. They browse in bookstores and work in gas stations. They drive their kids home from ball practice and help them with their homework after school. They fly planes, go to the neighborhood church, and run for office. Who are they? They are people who drink.

…..Zary Fekete entered recovery for alcohol addiction in February, 2018. During the following months he met many other people at various stages of their own recovery journeys. One of the unifying elements of each person’s journey was this: they all wrote.

….. To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction is a collection Fekete’s personal writing from the years of his recovery. Some pieces are fiction. Others are slices of real life. In this collection you will meet people, places, and things. And you may recognize yourself in some of them.

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….. Words on the page are powerful. They express love. They describe heroism and nobility. Could they also be the one thing that will save humanity from destruction?

….. In Words on the Page, Zach works at Net Scour, an agency with one sole task, to fight against a renegade Artificial Intelligence bent on corrupting the internet and invading the minds of every person on earth. Net Scour holds a secret weapon: the combined literary power of every book ever written. Through a breakthrough in quantum technology, the one way to defeat the AI is to saturate one’s mind with the power of written literature. Reading is power.

….. As Zach, and every other agent at Net Scout, spend all their days reading, they build a protective shield capable of defeating every attack that the AI can wield. But recently the AI has been growing in power, and there are cracks forming on the protective shield. One day Zach discovers a secret in the inner workings of Net Scour…and his life will never be the same. To discover the secret…read on.

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films.

Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete

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Kinds of Blue, by Sean Murphy [Kelsay Books].

…..Kinds of Blue is the third installment of a large and ongoing project that explores America and its mythology through a series of poems that function as biography, history, and cultural commentary. This collection, like the others before it, honors a number of icons (some well-known; others unfairly neglected), seeking to capture something essential about their lives and the times they lived in, bearing witness while paying homage.

…..Kinds of Blue carves out a designated space to celebrate black artistry, tracing an at times uneasy but undeniable line stretching from field hollers and the blues, to jazz, funk and beyond. Tributes to misunderstood or mistreated icons include musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Marvin Gaye, fighters like Joe Frazier and Marvin Hagler, and comedians like Richard Pryor and John Belushi. Despite every systemic disadvantage and all the obstacles placed in their paths, these geniuses—and others featured in this book—lived, played, persevered, and became immortal. America is still very much a work in progress, but any country that can claim such inspired forces of nature is worth preserving and celebrating.

A poem from the book:

Butch Warren’s Beatitudes*

“Don’t I have the right to be crazy if I want to be?”
—Butch Warren

That woman cleaning high rise offices after hours
once bellowed the blues in speakeasys, pimps roaming
the ‘hoods in three-piece suits, tossing bills on stage
like alms in collection baskets, a religious ritual from
days when dead presidents could make cops colorblind.

This janitor the grade school kids call Pops is the best
bass player nobody ever heard, because only anointed
cats signed by labels cut records, and studio work wasn’t
near enough to keep the heat on in Harlem, or anywhere
else you stopped to live when you weren’t on the road.

The invisible man—catching mist from the car wash
slipstream—spent more money on cigarettes he smoked
between sets than he makes now in tips, split ten ways
with co-workers whose fingers get numb from buffing steel,
the same way he ceaselessly scrubs memories from his mind.

That defenestrated scarecrow sporting five coats and fewer teeth—
who now counts time conducting traffic for change, or else stalking
the defunded psych ward—still hears the cheers from sold-out gigs,
back when the Blue Note buzzed like a honeycombed fortress full
of kings and soldiers, all extracting honey from air sticky with gold.

(*Butch Warren was an American jazz bassist best known for his work in the 1950s and 1960s. An addiction to heroin followed by extreme mental illness curtailed his music career and he was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. For years he alternated between hospitals and being homeless, working a series of odd, menial jobs.)

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 available from Finishing Line Press.

Click here to visit his website.

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The Other Side of the Bed and Beyond, by Linda Freudenberger [Finishing Line Press]

…..Linda Freudenberger’s first poetry chap book, “The Other Side of the Bed and Beyond” published by Finishing Line Press, contains 34 poems about love, loss, grief and cracking the light with poems about family, trees, dogs, and nature. The writing began as healing after the writer suddenly lost her husband of 42 years to cancer in a span of two weeks.

A poem from the book:

The other side of the bed

Has been empty going on four years.
In the beginning we spooned, or you curled
me under your protective wing.
As kids came and jobs pulled at us
we slept fetal back-to-back.

I cannot starfish or invade your side.
It is sacred space to me.
I yearn to hear the soft sawing
of your breath.
Still saving your space.
I cannot face the finality
of you not slipping under
the covers beside me.

Linda is a retired occupational therapist who turned to the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Ky enrolling in their Author Academy in 2019 and the Poetry Gantlet in 2020.

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Songburst, by Stephen Bett [BlazeVOX]

…..Breaking into song, or breaking it apart? Maybe a bit of both. Simultaneously a celebration & a send up of iconic pop culture lyrics. SongBu®st is a book-length serial poem that plays like a metafiction anchored on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of infrathin, & featuring characters, or rather figures, recurring & reframing themselves throughout.

“Stephen Bett’s new book SongBu®st sounds like a ship-wrecked wit (“We are coast people”) riffing at the end of the world. Here you’ll find snippets of old American pop songs morphed into takes on gun carnage and quotes from tech bros, each separated from the other by an “infrathin delay.” I’ve sometimes wondered what I would see (hear) if my actual life flashed before my eyes when I died. It might be a lot like this.”

—Rae Armantrout (Pulitzer Prize winning poet)

“What I began to realize, reading these sinuous poems from SongBu®st a second time through, is the musicality of the pieces. There is a syncopated energy, a forward drive that is very appealing. I have to say, they sparkle!”

—Ken Cathers (author of Missing Pieces and Letters From the Old Country)

A poem from the book:

Hey, Third Rail Infrathining

Ooh hey, hey, hey
Sunshine on a kick’d back day
Light me up, grrl …

Talkin ’bout
your livewire jag
lyin’ on yer ol’ third rail

I. guess. you’d. say.
What can make me feel that way?
Sounds like live ’Murican gunfire play

But tell me more …!
glued — like a stamp to a letter
(like birds of a feather)
says you been charged
poli-sci’d out, runaway Sue

Caint make you’m be untrue

Nuttin’ you could
say or do

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet. His earlier work is known for its sassy, edgy, hip… caustic wit―indeed, for the askance look of the serious satirist… skewering what he calls the ‘vapid monoculture’ of our times. His more recent books have been called an incredible accomplishment for their authentic minimalist subtlety. Many are tightly sequenced book-length ‘serial’ poems, which allow for a rich echoing of cadence and image, building a wonderfully subtle, nuanced music.

Bett follows in the avant tradition of Don Allen’s New American Poets. Hence the mandate for Simon Fraser University’s “Contemporary Literature Collection” to purchase and archive his “personal papers” for scholarly use.

He is recently retired after a 31-year teaching career largely at Langara College in Vancouver, and now lives with his wife Katie in Victoria, BC.

His website is StephenBett.com

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The Bottom of the Grab Bag/Foggy Bottom Stories, by Charles Joseph Albert

…..Twenty-eight stories of beltway insiders, aging heroes, social justice, guns, and nudism. My inspiration for writing these was frustration with national politics, combined with the fantastic influence of George Saunders’s master class on the short story, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” Other literary influences are Roald Dahl and O Henry. This is my 13th book, and my fourth short-story collection.

Charles Joseph Albert works as a metallurgist and writes poetry and prose while the slag is cooling. His most recent poems are collected in A Feel for the Water (2022) and his short-story collection A Horde of Cossacks was published in 2023.

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Jazz at the International Festival of Despair, by Michel Krug (Broadstone Books)

…..Jazz at the International Festival of Despair is my 81-poem ensemble that uses the theme of jazz as an expression of our era’s competing expressions of despair, grievance, lineage and joyousness during polarized times.

…..This book is an accumulation of cultural and personal artifacts fueled by music in sound and language. I hope readers feel a little DH Lawrence, some Yeats and Langston, Bell and the Beat Poets, and hear riffs of Coltrane and Miles.

…..My writing is infused by my prior career as a print journalist, legal practitioner and ardent lover of music.

…..Please join me at the Festival!

Information about the book can be viewed by clicking here

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and he litigates. His poems have appeared in New Verse News, Poetica Publishing, Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Portside, and many others.