WINNER of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize

W.W. Norton & Company ~ Hardback, 2010 ~ Paperback, 2011

Paperback ISBN-10: 0393339661 / ISBN-13: 978-0393339666

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“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 the judge’s statement

“There is something new here, maybe the birth of the new…The gems in this collection have that Ornate Coleman complexity and genius. I was the Jukebox heralds the shape of poems to come.”

~Ethelbert Miller

“[Beasley’s] lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep.”

~Abigail Deutsch, Poetry

“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.”

~Adam Palumbo, The Rumpus

• Named a “Best Poetry Book of 2011” by the Boston Globe
• Hear “The Piano Speaks,” recorded by the Poetry Foundation
• Read “Unit of Measure,” selected for Best American Poetry 2010
• Read “Vocation,” selected by the Academy of American Poets