Joel Lewis
LEARNING FROM NEW JERSEY
with visual works by Tim Daly

Talisman House, Publishers
ISBN 10: 1-58498-056-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-056-8
Paper, 121 + xii pp, 6x9
$14.95

In the crazy wisdom of no coincidence, Joel Lewis’s collection of linked poem, Learning from New Jersey hit the bed table along with Osip Mandelstam’s 50 Poems. Brothers in predilections, both poets have drawn from an ironic, loving regard for their cities. In Lewis’s “research expedition into/ an ordinary night,” his poems draw from his long time legend garnering, epic harrowing, factlet- threshing observations of the New Jersey territories. In these poems “the white noise of secret radios” crackles amid the mysterious geography of “Great Notch” and “Ong’s Hat.” Learning from New Jersey is as energetic, faceted and textured as the place it evokes. —Kimberly Lyons

Joel Lewis is a war journalist, a photo-journalist and always embedded. He's tape-recording YOU, Paterson, Hoboken, and Frank Sinatra because his life depends on it. Story-teller and known for an infinite taste for jazz, Lewis asserts a lot: slant-scapes a la Schuyler but much dirtier: the light rails, poverty, and comical revolts of no-generation in the no-environments of Robert Smithson and the whole corrosive company. These are reservoirs and archives for the future Ice Age in New Jersey. —David Shapiro

Unequal parts Robert Smithson, Captain Beefheart, Harvey Pekar and TedBerrigan, Lewis works his ass off archiving fads and tracking down pickpocket schools and other legends (Saddam Hussein’s love of Doritos?), and for what? Joel Lewis is one of the few poets going who is consistently as staggering and entertaining as the daily paper and coffee. Your hands may get dirty, but you'll definitely get stirred up. —Jordan Davis

Joel Lewis offers New Jersey to us the way Tsvetaeva offered Moscow to Mandelstam,  as a place of beauty and hideousness, peace and violence, joy and grief.  What's different here, though, is the poet’s inimitable pestiness, which cajoles us, finally, to smile at the radium sunset illuminating a JFK tumbler and  the Hudson Place ATM that swallows his MAC card.  I can’t imagine Joel ever looking like Leslie West, but I can imagine a battered UFO landing in North Bergen, my poetic eye “rewarded with some big mutt’s steaming heap on my shoes,” and tactile local daydreams. —Sharon Mesmer

Joel Lewis is the author of Vertical's Currency: New and Selected Poems, among other books. He is also the editor of Bluestones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets, On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living by Ted Berrigan, and Reality Prime: Selected Poems of Walter Lowenfels. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

POETRY