Limousine, Midnight Blue [Paperback]

Jamey Hecht (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2009

This sequence of fifty 14-line poems uses the Zapruder Film of President Kennedy's murder as a prism through which to view America and the world.  Refracted rays touch on crime and punishment; guilt and responsibility; charisma and love; the dying victim's experience during the stretched-out seconds of his violation and death; and the dark world of war profiteering, narco-traffic, and deceit where the facts of power determine history.  Epic tradition (e.g., Homer, Dante, Milton) shares these pages with science, religion, and popular culture, now funny and now horrifying.  Limousine, Midnight Blue is a haunted book about a haunted film of an event whose hungry ghosts still walk the American unconscious, rattling their chains louder every year.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ovid himself might have taken notice of this volume.  It's one thing to turn a woman into a tree, another more advanced thing to transform fifty frames of the Zapruder film into as many sonnets.  LIMOUSINE, MIDNIGHT BLUE is a radical display of poetry's ability to freeze time, to catch fugitive--and here, disputed--moments in the 

amber of form.
---Billy Collins

About the Author

Jamey Hecht was born in 1968, between the murders of Dr. King and RFK. He’s the author of Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999) and a translation, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2004). He has edited the books Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, and Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History by Larry Hancock. Jamey Hecht has covered Peak Oil and geopolitics at www.fromthewilderness.com, and has taught world literature at various universities. His PhD is from Brandeis, where he wrote on Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas. Hecht’s poetry and prose have been published in a variety of scholarly journals and literary magazines. www.jameyhecht.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Red Hen Press; 1 edition (February 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597091286
• ISBN-13: 978-1597091282
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #536,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jamey Hecht is the author of four books: Plato's Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999); a translation, Sophocles' Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus (Wordsworth, 2004); Bloom's How To Write About Homer (Chelsea House, 2010); and a collection of poems, Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film (Red Hen Press, 2009). His poetry, criticism and journalism have appeared in some 30 publications including Black Warrior Review, Tikkun, and ELH. He enjoys acting in Shakespeare productions in Los Angeles with the Porters of Hellsgate.

About Limousine, Midnight Blue: This sequence of fifty 14-line elegies for President Kennedy uses the film of his murder as a prism through which to view America and the world. See http://www.jameyhecht.com for short one-poem videos with text; links; blurbs from BILLY COLLINS and PETER DALE SCOTT.