Moonglow á Go-Go: new and selected poems - Softcover

Smith, Joan Jobe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1630450391 ISBN 13: 9781630450397

Publisher: NYQ Books, 2017

Synopsis

In Moonglow Á Go-Go, Smith gives the reader a sweeping biopic of an extraordinary and exuberant life written with heart and humor and insight as only Joan Jobe Smith can. After a near-fatal, devastating attack by a husband, she survived to support her 3 young children by working 7 years as a go-go girl in the 1960s golden age of rock and roll, becoming an award-winning, internationally-published poet who chronicled her hectic go-go years, her Texan depression-era parents, the wild fun-filled 1960s-70s California lifestyle, her friendship with Charles Bukowski and much more in these lyrical, straight-talking, delightful and imaginative poems shining and dancing with moonglow that take you through her amazing life and leave you moved and uplifted.

About this title

About the Author

Joan Jobe Smith, Pushcart honoree and Forward Prize finalist, was born in Paris, Texas in 1940. Since age 10, her poetry, prose, art, reviews, essays, and cooking columns have appeared internationally in more than 1000 publications--including a billboard. Founding editor of literary journals Pearl and Bukowski Review, she received her BA from California State University Long Beach and Master of Fine Arts from University of California Irvine after working 7 years as a go- go girl. With her husband, poet Fred Voss, she has toured the UK 7 times reading her poetry, debuting at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1991 and in 2017 appeared at the Hull City of Culture Literary Festival. She lives in Long Beach, California, 2 blocks from the Pacific Ocean.

Review

"The poems of Joan Jobe Smith have the reality of force properly put down on paper ... a game girl ... she cuts herself loose into the stratosphere ... a strange woman, a strange, good, basic woman."
--Charles Bukowski

"Thank God for Joan Jobe Smith. She is one of the great wonders of the small press revolution she helped kick-start nearly five decades ago. Her poems read like firecrackers and heart attacks and CPR and the Roman candles Jack Kerouac shouted about in On The Road. She tells her beautiful and terrible and life-affirming truths in long, rolling, jazzed up, beautifully-crafted glitter-lines that beckon like the jeweled interstates of her California. A Texas native living at the edge of America, she go-go danced in Hollywood and watched the sailors harbor in Long Beach. She understands the pain of being alive and how living through the pain and telling the story of survival allows us beauty. Like Whitman, she contains multitudes. She is a parent trying to afford her children. She is a wife trying to live with impossible men. She is a go-go dancer trying to glisten and shake everything she has to make a living. In telling the beautiful, heartbreaker, blood-honest moments she knows so well, Joan Jobe Smith stands up, with you, with me, with all of us who have had a rough go in this life. She is telling your story and my story and our story in a way we've never heard it, in a way you and I know is true, and in a way that will change the way we can see and survive this one and precious life."
--Lori Jakiela, author of Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe

About this edition

• Publisher: NYQ Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1630450391
• ISBN 13: 9781630450397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160