This is Joel Lewis's fourth poetry collection. He edited Bluestones and Salt Hay, an anthology of New Jersey poets, as well as Reality Prime, the selected poems of Walter Lowenfels, and On the Level Everyday, the selected talks of Ted Berrigan. A social worker by day, he has taught writing at The Poetry Project, The Writer's Voice, and Rutgers University. He and his wife, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, a cinema professor at Rutgers, live in Hoboken.
Praise for Joel Lewis:
"I think it is possible to read Joel Lewis as the offspring of some celestial union of the New York School and the Objectivists—all that attention to detail, the wild sense of humor—but I read him myself as following in the tradition of the great New Jersey bards, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams—that wild sense of humor, all the attention to detail. This is a wonderful, joyous book of poems, but even more important is the vision here of the great push-pull between poetry and life. This is one ride you won't want to stop."
—Ron Silliman
"Let me know if this is or isn't ok. Reading the book made me very happy. If it were possible to work "a dialectical lasagna of grays" into the blurb, I'd do it, but I don't know that I can manage it in a way that serves the p.r. component of jacket copy."
—Anselm Berrigan
"What do we love? The workers? The people? The masses? Sit down at the giant smorgasboard of contemporary American poetry and dish out a healthy serving of Joel Lewis. Lifelong New Jersey resident and dedicated social worker, Lewis is an informal oral historian in verse. With appearances ranging from Babe Ruth to Mama Cass, Hannah Weiner to Harold Bloom, the proof of the pudding is in these poems."
—Jennifer Karmin
Hanging Loose Press
