Vertical's Currency [Hardcover]

Joel Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

Poetry. Got my clove cigarettes and a hunk/ of challah smeared with ersatz butter. / My imagined Jew beanie is warming/ my alleged brains/ as monochromatic Clarkson Street/ looms like an overstuffed burrito. (from Leaving It up to You) Joel Lewis has written some of the best jazz poems I've ever read. In VERTICALS CURRENCY he gives us all the humor and empathy an ethno-glossary of North Jersey can provide. Imagine Jim Brodey writing prescriptions on Dr. Williams' pad. RX: One urine puck with coffee every 2 hours for the blues, followed by a dip in the Lou Costello Pool. These poems come at you over the counter like an anodyne with eyes ... Use as needed. And often (Michael Gizzi). A well known anthologist and editor as well as a poet, Joel Lewis won the Ted Berrigan award for his most recent book, HOUSE RENT BOOGIE (Yellow Press) also available from SPD. Lewis is a New Jersey native, former social worker, and luftmensch, who has taught at Rutrgers University, New School University and the College of Saint Elizabeth.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Commuting in from northern New Jersey, Lewis constituted almost the entire graduating class of the fifth-generation of New York School poets, studying with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and Maureen Owen, among others. His well-caffeinated poems deflect his teachers energy for the quotidian away from private lives and back toward public things: civic statues, fast food, popular music (jazz mainly, but also 70s AOR retreads like Traffic, Steve Miller, and Pablo Cruise), and the rubble that constantly radiates up from the rubble. Lewis is an acute observer of Americas ever-unmentionable class wars, and his catalogues of pungent references and poignant rumors make memorable what was only meant to hold the attention between impulse purchases. His New Jersey has been uneasily partitioned between parties loyal to Lou Costello and to William Carlos Williams, and like his less-abstruse Hoboken neighbor Mark Leyner, he appears to be a double agent. Winter Evening, Passaic, Hoboken Early Sunday Morning, North Jersey Gutter Helmet and Route 3, Nutley (Mad)the last rolls through the town where Valium gets madeare warm, sturdy and truthful landscapes. Nervous Fabric, a devastating and funny sequence (I dont have a cow!/ Nobody here has a cow! Were Jews,/ not farmers!) makes explicit Lewiss connection to the great Yiddish aphorists. A journalist and anthologist besides, Lewis stands to become a national presence with this very negotiable currency.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

After Hearing The Lee Konitz Trio
Algiers
At The Melville Room
At The Shrine Of Lou Costello, Paterson
Back At The Jodo
Been Here, Done That
Bergenline Avenue, Union City
Birth Of The Cool
Blue Comedy
Cool Blue Halo
Dub Housing
The Dupree Bolton Discography
Entropia
Flavor Bud Living
Fringe Parking
Gravity Fails
The Heavenly Music Corporation
Hoboken Early Sunday Morning
In Paterson: 1
In Paterson: 2
In Paterson: 3
In Paterson: 6
In Paterson: 7
In The Great Falls Historic District In Paterson: 5
Iron Path
Is, Was (changing)
Leaving It Up To You
Lennie Tristano's Subway Stop
Lou Costello, 1942 In Paterson: 4
Main Street, Paterson
Making A Meal Out Of It
Market Street, Newark
Mechanical Weathering: Paterson Scanned Postcards
Minus Water
Nervous Fabric
North Jersey Gutter Helmut
One Red Rose That I Mean
The Piano On Canal
Puddles Of Wisdom
Route 3, Nutley (mad)
Shine On Brightly
Spinner
To The Great Hard-bop Pianists
Tonto's Expanding Headband
The Track Of My Tears
Up In Lakeville
When We Go
Winter Evening, Passaic
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 134 pages
• Publisher: Talisman House Pub (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883689848
• ISBN-13: 978-1883689841
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,898,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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