Overview

Ken Meisel's got the beat in his hit parade of Motown poems. I love his long lines and smoky fires, the effect gravity has on the living and the dead. His Purgatorio includes Marvin Gaye, an echo of better times painted onto a billboard overlooking the freeway and Dubois Street. Meisel is interested in the music of grassy fields and abandoned places...wild pheasants and drunks. He is our modern Virgil talking us through the Rinaldo Arms Manor. Read him and be saved. Russell Thorburn, poet, author of Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged, The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard, and The Drunken Piano

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9781933964324

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Reviews

With an authority and authenticity all his own, Ken Meisel, born and raised in Detroit, finds the busted-up beauty and unseen shine buried beneath the rust and ruin that is its own beautiful Detroit. He writes: I have a pen inside my/ finger. It keeps writing words/ so the silenced ones can speak. There is juke-joint jazz mixed with Motown funk in the music of Meisel's voice, a sound punctuated by the hushed silences of a city defined by its own shrinkage into absence. Like a post-punk Orpheus, Meisel guides his readers on a red-light ride through a side of the city most people rarely see, where behind every transient face the poet knows both their names and the stories, where behind every darkened window and crumbling wall there is an unheard melody that Meisel transforms into song. --Peter Markus, author of Bob, or Man on Boat

With an authority and authenticity all his own, Ken Meisel, born and raised in Detroit, finds the busted-up beauty and unseen shine buried beneath the rust and ruin that is its own beautiful Detroit. He writes: I have a pen inside my/ finger. It keeps writing words/ so the silenced ones can speak. There is juke-joint jazz mixed with Motown funk in the music of Meisel s voice, a sound punctuated by the hushed silences of a city defined by its own shrinkage into absence. Like a post-punk Orpheus, Meisel guides his readers on a red-light ride through a side of the city most people rarely see, where behind every transient face the poet knows both their names and the stories, where behind every darkened window and crumbling wall there is an unheard melody that Meisel transforms into song. Peter Markus, author of Bob, or Man on Boat

Author Information

Ken Meisel is a poet and a psychotherapist. He was born on the west side of Detroit and educated in the Detroit Public Schools. He earned his post graduate degrees in Detroit. Ken Meisel s father played big band jazz with Sam Donahue s Orchestra, in Black Bottom, on Hasting Street in the 1930 s and 1940 s. Ken Meisel grew up listening to those stories. This is his fourth book of poetry and his first from Bottom Dog Press.

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