MISTERIOSO. Poems

Feinstein, Sascha

ISBN 10: 1556591365 / ISBN 13: 9781556591365

Published by Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 1999,, 1999

About this Item

Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 1999, 1999. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. first printing. Pages xii + 71,trade paperback, first printing. Book is in near Fine condition. 012306A. ISBN: 1-55659-136-5.

Seller Inventory # 9514

Bibliographic Details

• Title: MISTERIOSO. Poems
• Publisher: Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 1999,
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556591365
• ISBN 13: 9781556591365
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine

About this title

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.

Reviews

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
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