Misterioso: Poems (Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets) - Softcover

Feinstein, Sascha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556591365 ISBN 13: 9781556591365

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2000

Synopsis

One of Copper Canyon Press's missions is to introduce the work of new poets. With the launching of the annual Hayden Carruth Award, the Press is excited to introduce the work of Sascha Feinstein.

Chosen from over a thousand manuscript submissions, Misterioso is steeped in the biographies, history, and sounds of jazz music, using a distinctly American idiom to explore personal relationships. Whether writing about John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk (the inspiration for the book's title), Feinstein transcends mere portraiture by emphasizing the meditative and sonorous qualities of jazz music. Feinstein's insistent voice and music are a welcome addition to contemporary American poetry.

"Feinstein links memory, feeling, autobiography, official history with imagination the same way recording engineers ingeniously mix, shape, and color sound....It is bloood and kin, eruptions and rushes of love, scratches of silence--sometimes barely audible between beats--that make these walking, talking poems leap to life and burst into flame."-Al Young

"Feinstein's debut merits the first Hayden Carruth Emerging Poets Award because the poems in it are good, sturdy work and because so many of them touch on one of Carruth's passions, jazz....Feinstein writes excellently about other things--his mother's death, cremations he has witnessed, his love for his Asian wife and their children--but the jazz poems uniquely communicate what it is like to live with music one adores."-Ray Olson, Booklist

Sascha Feinstein, winner of the first annual Hayden Carruth Award, has published poems in numerous magazines and journals, such as American Poetry Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. He is the co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set, and the author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. He is an Associate Professor of English at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.

About this title

From Library Journal:

Winner of this year's Hayden Carruth Emerging Poets Award, Feinstein is consistently imbued with the presence of jazz; not in the "jazz and poetry" sense of some performance poets but in the subject matter of his poems. Nearly every poem in this slim volume evokes one or more jazz musicians, who move in and out of these pages like friends the poet has known all his life (and, in some cases, he has!). Readers encounter "Jackson's vibraharp mellifluous/ against Monk's dissonant chords" and "Al Cohn and Zoot Sims spouting tenor saxes." Here are a whole set of sonnets for Stan Gage and an opening poem commemorating John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk ("All evening/ Monk and Trane played backup/ to trays of heavy crystal clinking/ Jack Daniels on ice." The poems move with bouncily jazzy energy and rhythm and an almost stream-of-consciousness sort of transition from subject to subject within poems: a poem about his mother's attempts to drive a nesting mouse and her babies from an old piano by playing "Maple Leaf Rag" concludes with a memory of Art Tatum's "round gut near the keys, how he'd lean back, flash/ his Steinway-smile." Recommended.DJudy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

Above And Below The Surface
All The Scars
Amulets
Anders And The Norns
Blues For Zoot
Blues Knowledge
Blues Villanelle For Sonny Criss
Buying Wine
Christmas Eve
Coltrane, Coltrane
Corcovado 1. Antabuse: August 12th
Corcovado 2. Palace Debut: October 23rd
Corcovado 3.gold Leaf: October 25th
Corcovado 5. State Dinner: October 29th
Corcovado 6. Palace Garden: November 5th
Corcovado 7.salle Pleyel, Paris: November 13th
Corcovado 4. Round Trip: October 27th
December Blues
Il Cristo Velato
Isis
The Long Walk
Mango
Miss Brown To You (1915-1959)
Misterioso
Portraits And Ceremony
Premonitions Of Sangsit
Ruby, My Dear
Sienna Blossoms
Singapore, July 4th
Sonnets For Stan Gage (1945-1992)
Summer Cremations 1.cape Cod, 1980
Summer Cremations 2. Bali, 1987
Summerhouse Piano
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1556591365
• ISBN 13: 9781556591365
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 71