Julie Kane












          




Just Out from Story Line Press (Summer 2009)



   

To order a signed copy with a personal inscription, telephone J. Michael Kenny at The Book Merchant Book Shop in Natchitoches, Louisiana, (318) 357-8900, or email jmichael@thebookmerchant.com.


Winner of the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Award, judged by David Mason


“Following the success of her first two volumes, Body and Soul and Rhythm & Booze, Julie Kane has written a brilliant new book that proves once again how surprisingly vital the sonnet can be. From the transgressive ‘Bitch’ to ‘Mockingbird’ with its ‘pretty girl in crosshairs of a gun,’ Kane’s opening sequence parallels the jazz funeral’s 'March to the Graveyard,' mordant without ever slipping into the maudlin, highly spiced and knowing.

In the book’s second section, ‘A Hobo’s Crown,’ we get a single life remembered—that of Robert Borsodi, a writer and independent theatrical impresario who made New Orleans his home and supported its artists. This 'Eulogy' recalls the players and the coffeehouse where bare bones performances stood up against the violence of the world outside. Even here, of course, New Orleans is a storm-haunted city:

...You never lived to see
the halls of Charity entombed with mold,
dead bodies strewn like roadkill in the streets,
Borsodi’s flooded like a toilet bowl.
Thank God for that, at least. We miss your light,
warm as a campfire on a bitter night.
The third movement of a jazz funeral is 'Cutting the Body Loose,' in music an explosion of celebration, and here Kane’s post-Katrina poems are fiercely unsentimental. Part elegy for a city and a way of life, part meditation on mortality and grace, this book is wonderfully, defiantly alive.”
-- David Mason


"Anyone who knows Julie Kane's work knows she is one of the funniest poets writing. . . Following the tradition of poets like Marianne Moore and Marilyn Hacker, Kane's deft selections have a quick, airy feel, moving effortlessly over the grid of the sonnet."
-- Kim Bridgford in Mezzo Cammin (Click here to read the full text of Kim Bridgford's review.)