Comes To This is a landmark for the strange times we live in. More profoundly, Jeff Weddle is a word warrior of the soil and of the air we breathe. This new collection highlights his humanity and his tender moments but there is also his call for resistance in poems. Kind, moving, at times joyful, at times dark, Comes to This is an unapologetic, no-holds barred homage to Bukowski and Ginsberg. The battle against depraved conformity, monstrous greed, and coolcomplacency begins anew. Jeff Weddle’s poetry is armed and dangerous.

Comes To This

Literature & Fiction

Weddle, Jeff

Poetry

Nixes Mate Books

Winner of the 2007 Welty Prize In 1960, Jon Edgar and Louise ?Gypsy Lou? Webb founded Loujon Press on Royal Street in New Orleans?s French Quarter. The small publishing house quickly became a giant. Heralded by the Village Voice and the New York Times as one of the best of its day, the Outsider, the press?s literary review, featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Walter Lowenfels. Loujon published books by Henry Miller and two early poetry collections by Bukowski. Bohemian New Orleans traces the development of this courageous imprint and examines its place within the small press revolution of the 1960s. Drawing on correspondence from many who were published in the Outsider, back issues of the Outsider, contemporary reviews, promotional materials, and interviews, Jeff Weddle shows how the press?s mandarin insistence on production quality and its eclectic editorial taste made its work nonpareil among peers in the underground. Throughout, Bohemian New Orleans reveals the messy, complex, and vagabond spirit of a lost literary age.

Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press

History & Criticism

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

In 1960, Jon Edgar and Louise "Gypsy Lou" Webb founded Loujon Press on Royal Street in New Orleans's French Quarter. The small publishing house quickly became a giant. Heralded by the Village Voice and the New York Times as one of the best of its day, the Outsider, the press's literary review, featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Walter Lowenfels. Loujon published books by Henry Miller and two early poetry collections by Bukowski. 
Bohemian New Orleans traces the development of this courageous imprint and examines its place within the small press revolution of the 1960s. 
Drawing on correspondence from many who were published in the Outsider, back issues of the Outsider, contemporary reviews, promotional materials, and interviews, Jeff Weddle shows how the press's mandarin insistence on production quality and its eclectic editorial taste made its work nonpareil among peers in the underground. Throughout, Bohemian New Orleans reveals the messy, complex, and vagabond spirit of a lost literary age.
Learn about Director Wayne Ewing's documentary film "The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press" and watch a trailer at http://www.loujonpress.com/

Jeff Weddle writes like an ancient warrior, a survivor and a dreamer. Time and wisdom have taught him to find balance in the details, and allowed him the honesty to say everything hurts. He paints cautionary tales in a world where we are governed by the mad. He struggles for his tiny victories in the greatest hotel room he has ever been inside. Jeff Weddle sees saints' libraries and says he is looking for a miracle, but almost anything will do. In the end he writes what he believes with power and truth that come from a lifetime of understanding and a commitment to leave pages like ready bullets. Jeff's poems are locked and loaded and aimed dead at your heart your head and your spirit. Matt Borczon, author of My Reality (Alien Buddha)In an early poem in Jeff Weddle's new collection, the poet creates a metaphor of an old woman cooking bacon, not for the protein itself, but for the grease it will produce. I would suggest that this is a perfect metaphor for Weddle's poems. They sizzle down in the mind and leave us starving for the next sensory overload. He has a way of making the ordinary poignant and even luminous, and distills things down to their essence, like this bacon grease, alchemical and still useful. The poet also says that "I am holy like a razor/agitated like a buffalo/repentant like an electric chair." This is a man ready for tragedy and comedy simultaneously, and aware of the capable violence and redemption inherent in the act of writing. These poems could only have been written by someone who has experienced life openly, freely, painfully, and experimentally in order to acquire the wisdom which could utter: "and we/fade with the weight of moments/like so much drying dew." Joseph V. Milford is the author of the poetry collections CRACKED ALTIMETER (BlazeVox Press) and TATTERED SCROLLS AND POSTULATES, VOL I. (Backlash Press). He is an English professor and Creative Writing instructor living south of Atlanta, Georgia. He also edits the online poetry thread, RASPUTIN, A POETRY THREAD.

It's Colder Than Hell, Starving Elves Eat Reindeer Meat, Santa Claus Is Dead

Focks, Red

Buddha, Alien

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Dead Man's Hand

Poetic Justice Books

The latest collection by award winning poet Jeff Weddle (There's More to It Than That) showcases the poet's astounding observation of the rapidly deteriorating human condition. Whether watching a cat or ruminating on a relationship writ large, Weddle's poems pull the rug of comfort out from the reader to send us crashing to the floor to look for scattered crumbs of hope. This is poetry that makes us look at what we are.\nIt's beautifully image driven and his sense of irony combined with a view 
deep into the human spirit are killer combinations. - Pris Campbell

Advice for Cannibals

"In How It Went to Pieces, Jeff Weddle, author of 13 previous books, casts his succinct, side wise glance at old age, love, children, dogs and cats cannibals and death. Weddle, both pragmatist and optimist, moves his poems easily from poverty to abundance with wry sketches, and intimate vignettes. The dreamy quality of living weaves through these poems which never forget life's inevitable end. In the suite of short poems that close the book, Weddle considers his own "Requium." When I die bury me in a lost motel..../After all, I was just a dream. How It Went to Pieces is a dream, you want to have." -Wendy Taylor Carlisle, the author of four books and five chapbooks and the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. "Weddle's poems are immediately and refreshingly engaging, possessing a clear and honest music that pulls you along. Many of the pieces here have a sense of hard-won peace about them, others share a longing for people and an America that no longer exist. The mood is occasionally mournful but never too far away from the possibility of joy. This is a poetry of these times, exploring and celebrating our humanity in a manner much needed. " -William Taylor, Jr., Pretty Things to Say (Six Ft.Swells Press, 2020) "Reading, How It Went To Pieces, is like finding a stranger's old photo album. There are images you vaguely recognize and relate to but make you feel what might have been. Poems that take you to the wrong town where you find "broken roads leading to nowhere, beer drunk days, beautiful lies, a quarter moon flirting, stray moments that might have meant love" and only the ghosts of moments gone by. Jeff Weddle's poet-ry creates clear and unfiltered scenes that make you believe you were there. Which is what good poetry does." -Todd Cirillo, author of Kisses From a Straight Razor "Jeff Weddle is a brilliant poet unmatched in elegance of craft and soul-steeped insight. His intelligent, sharply observant verses move with graceful eloquence across the pages of this book. Weddle's poems build intricate bridges between mundane and more illuminated planes of consciousness, and travel unflinchingly through the darker corners, as well. They wander through warm memories held close, brave the cruel gray of loss and heartbreak, and cozy up for coffee and conversation with ghosts, cats, and cherished loved ones encountered through time. Together they sing elegies for the ailing human spirit and emerge with pebbles of hope, sometimes entire mountains: "Somewhere there is a spark and somehow you keep it burning." - from "Sometimes It Hurts." How It Went To Pieces challenges perception, calls out many of today's bitter injustices, triumphs in the strength of the human heart, and tends to psychic wounds too familiar to us all. It celebrates and soothes the timeless, uncompromising soul, ever following pathways made of stars-"Coins on eyes don't fool anyone. I'm wide awake inside the inside."- from "A Dream Within a Dream." This collection is a rare treasure, entirely real." -Tanya Rakh, poet and author at Posthuman Poetry & Prose

How it Went to Pieces

Kung Fu Treachery Press

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Books by Weddle, Jeff

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weddle, Jeff. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Comes To This

Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press

Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press

It's Colder Than Hell, Starving Elves Eat Reindeer Meat, Santa Claus Is Dead

Dead Man's Hand

Advice for Cannibals

How it Went to Pieces