“These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”
-Joy Harjo, from her judge’s citation
“There is something new here, maybe the birth of the new….The gems in this collection have that Ornette Coleman complexity and genius. I Was the Jukebox heralds the shape of poems to come.’”
-E. Ethelbert Miller
Listen to Sandra read “I Don’t Fear Death,” a poem from I Was the Jukebox…
…and “The Story,” also a poem from I Was the Jukebox…
Trade hardback - $24.95 - ISBN #978-0-393-07651-6 - Pub. date April 2010
Available through many Barnes and Noble and Borders retailers; for those in the area of Washington, DC, available at Politics & Prose, Kramerbooks, and Busboys & Poets. Also available through Amazon.com, Powell’s, and directly from W. W. Norton. Complimentary exam copies are available for teachers. For more information on W. W. Norton and to order, please go to their website.
Reviews:
Publisher’s Weekly - More fun than most recent books, Beasley’s second collection can also get quite serious: in the best parts, the poet pretends she is any number of nonhuman things—a jukebox, an orchid, the Egyptian god Osiris, an eggplant (in a sestina), grains of sand. She also writes “love poems” to big ideas: “Love Poem for College” begins “You hit on me. You hit on everyone.” Beasley portrays the sometimes chaotic landscape between sex and love, youth and adulthood, the young men and women who hope for everything and the grownups who settle for less. “For an hour I forgot my fat self./ My neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment,” says the piano, remembering when she was played. In “Another Failed Poem About Music,” “even the name” of a percussion instrument, “triangle… is a perfect betrayal.” Beasley can sound regretful, but also flirtatious: “You are the loneliest of the three bears,” she says in “Love Poem for Wednesday,” “hoping/ to come home and find someone in your bed.” If Beasley’s conceits owe something to Kenneth Koch, her tone and her subjects might place her with chick lit, too: this is a book that could go a long way. (Apr.)
The Rumpus (Adam Palumbo) - Readers of energetic, ornate, and enthused poetry—step forward. I’ve got your woman. Sandra Beasley’s newest collection of poems, I Was The Jukebox, can best be described as playful surreal. Her poems take on the forms of pocket-sized fantasies; in each of her finely tuned poems, she occupies herself with representing different experiential voices, and she succeeds (to a tremendous level) at creating fascinating slices of reality and interesting characters.
Feminist Review (Michelle Tooker) - From the first page to the ninetieth page Beasley blends refreshing imagery with unique diction. She mixes myth and modernity. She creates lines that float from the pages and haunt your thoughts….Poetry is supposed to accomplish all that Beasley’s poems accomplish—it should make you think of something in a new way, it should leave you breathless, and it should follow you long after you’re done reading.
Bookslut (Salvatore Ruggiero) - Sandra Beasley takes this “voice to the voiceless” to the absurd extreme. As the title hints, Beasley gives vocal chords to world wars, pianos, the platypus, and, evidently, a jukebox. Her project’s challenge is to inhabit anything that contemporary humans cannot communicate with via words. Words may create the foundation of poetry, but the words in Beasley’s work more so create the foundation of character in the inanimate, personality in the object. Such defamiliarization with the subject-speaker gives us an amusing and sometimes insightful look into the voiceless. Though perhaps this is more of an exercise to look into Beasley’s active, nimble imagination.
New Pages (Kate Angus) - Rather than the personal “I’ of the poet opening up into a universal experience, Beasley gives us the universal as filtered through her own clear and unsentimental eye….Beasley’s willingness to acknowledge the dangerous rage at the heart of the domestic makes poems like “The Natives Are Restless” and “The Parade,” with their “Hello, Dali” depictions of an absurdist American suburban landscape, [are] particularly strong. This is a fierce, funny, and moving collection.
Dear Reader (Richard Howorth in the Square Books Newsletter) - I have an economic theory of poetry: a truly exceptional line or phrase that takes your mind someplace interesting is worth at least a couple of dollars; so, if there are ten such lines in a book of poetry, it’s about worth what you paid for it. By this theory, the value of I Was The Jukebox is more than ten times its cost because there are several remarkable lines and ideas in virtually every poem in the book….Sandra Beasley’s poems combine the surprise and revelation of history and ideas with a vivid, artistic imagination of language—separate forms that constantly collide and unite, often sending the reader into a euphoric, luxurious dream-state.
The Delmarva Review (John Elsberg) - [Beasley's] tone and view are very much of the present, even as she strikingly summons up the poetic past in her use of the conceit, a single image (jukebox, piano, eggplant) as the linking metaphor in a poem. A welcome example of how modern poetry can be distinctive in approach and style and also accessible.
One Man’s Trash blog (Justin Evans) - Returning for another go-around is Beasley’s ability to make image-conscious connections which are entirely startling. Not a poem passes by where the reader can say they have not seen anything new. As a writer, I marvel at how natural it all seems.
// Last updated July 29, 2010 //