Music from Words is a stunning first collection of poems that ranges from the elegiac to the experimental. It captures the spirit of Modernists and the emotion of jazz in a music all its own. Music from Words begins with the charm of a master poet recreating stories of men or women just before a crisis begins or ends, at a precarious equipoise before a moment of change. Some are famous, others ordinary people. A modern-day Moses sees the burning bush in the suburbs. Gilgamesh is caught in a traffic jam. A former Whiz Kid game show contestant dissolves into psychosis. Hugo Ball, one of the founders of the Dada movement, sells his wife to soldiers. All of the characters come alive in verse, their stories echoing moments of ecstasy, tragedy, irony and comedy. Mr. Jampole creates some of the deepest feeling people you will ever meet. Then, slowly, section by section, Mr. Jampole begins his riff. He cycles into poems of protest and loss. He echoes Coltrane and Charles Ives in his melodic range. His work is a subversion of confessional conventionalism: his celebrations of self are much more carefully abstract, until the reader cannot fathom if they are celebrations of self or retellings of the Everyman myth. The poems will surprise you, because they thoroughly examine life and ideas in new ways. For example, he riffs on a love song by directing a speaker s affections to a woman in a Seurat painting. Stylistic play, iconoclastic form, heightened imagination Music from Words is a sensitive and astonishing first collection.

Music From Words

Literature & Fiction

Marc Jampole

Poetry

Bellday Books

<p>Family Matters: Homage to July, The Slave Girl is a group of poems about slaves, slave owners and slave owning in North Carolina. The distinguished poet Allen Grossman, has selected Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, by Shelby Stephenson of Benson, North Carolina as the winner of the 2008 Bellday Poetry Prize. About the winning entry, Professor Grossman said, An intense and heart-breaking poetic narrative which, in its exploration of historical and personal materials, holds affinities to the work of Susan Howe and to James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Family Matters is a strenuous questioning and exposure of the fictions of ownership, whether of persons or places, graves or farms.</p>

Family Matters: Homage to July, The Slave Girl

Shelby Stephenson

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Books by Bellday Books

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Music From Words

Family Matters: Homage to July, The Slave Girl