Overview

Joseph Cooper's Talk Like Jazz is a powerfully honest coming-of-age story about growing up along the complex intersections of impediment, family, friendship, mental illness, and escape in working class Buffalo. Written in distinctively bold poetic fragments, Talk Like Jazz is a haunting and persistent tale exploring the vulnerabilities of adolescence and solitude, and the redemptive powers of relationship and art.

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9781948712293

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Talk Like Jazz by Joseph Cooper is an acute, stunning, and remarkable book. It is a psalter for the tongue that flickers between blows and a guidebook for how to survive the precision of the void while singing. In the gap-forms generated by the animated stammer, all the light gets in and if we get in with it, we might all get seen. I couldn't put this book down until the last page and then I wanted to keep going into its beyond. --Selah Saterstrom, The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan, Slab, and Ideal Suggestions A mischievous novel, Talk Like Jazz tells the story of a boy transforming into a poet through exorcizing his stutter. Betrayed by his tongue, our narrator spends his childhood fantasizing his revenge, pretending ...my tongue is Marie Antoinette and I the aroused executioner as I drop my teeth. Sex and drugs lure him out of his surreal dreams and silence as he finds friends and fellow freaks who help guide him through 1990s suburban Buffalo. Cooper's exact prose combines the playful concision of Joe Brainard's memoir, I Remember, with grotesque caricatures la Art Spiegelman's The Garbage Pail Kids. Talk Like Jazz is a coming of age novel, but know that it is also a detective novel with a stuttering narrator puzzled by the intersection of impediment, family, language, sexuality, and music. --Kevin Kilroy, The Escapees, Dead Ends: or Laughing Gas One of the many things I'm leaving with from Talk Like Jazz is a better awareness of when I, and other people run our mouths too much, because Joseph Cooper shows us the beauty and possibility within silence, observation, and sharing space. And like what's in the title, this book is honest about the bodily and social improvisation we do with our personal and public selves in order to stay safe/explore during the process of becoming. It's a gorgeous thing to feel so loved by a book. --Steven Dunn, Potted Meat, and water & power

Talk Like Jazz by Joseph Cooper is an acute, stunning, and remarkable book. It is a psalter for the tongue that flickers between blows and a guidebook for how to survive the precision of the void while singing. In the gap-forms generated by the animated stammer, all the light gets in and if we get in with it, we might all get seen. I couldn't put this book down until the last page and then I wanted to keep going into its beyond. --Selah Saterstrom, The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan, Slab, and Ideal Suggestions A mischievous novel, Talk Like Jazz tells the story of a boy transforming into a poet through exorcizing his stutter. Betrayed by his tongue, our narrator spends his childhood fantasizing his revenge, pretending .. .my tongue is Marie Antoinette and I the aroused executioner as I drop my teeth. Sex and drugs lure him out of his surreal dreams and silence as he finds friends and fellow freaks who help guide him through 1990s suburban Buffalo. Cooper's exact prose combines the playful concision of Joe Brainard's memoir, I Remember, with grotesque caricatures la Art Spiegelman's The Garbage Pail Kids. Talk Like Jazz is a coming of age novel, but know that it is also a detective novel with a stuttering narrator puzzled by the intersection of impediment, family, language, sexuality, and music. --Kevin Kilroy, The Escapees, Dead Ends: or Laughing Gas One of the many things I'm leaving with from Talk Like Jazz is a better awareness of when I, and other people run our mouths too much, because Joseph Cooper shows us the beauty and possibility within silence, observation, and sharing space. And like what's in the title, this book is honest about the bodily and social improvisation we do with our personal and public selves in order to stay safe/explore during the process of becoming. It's a gorgeous thing to feel so loved by a book. --Steven Dunn, Potted Meat, and water & power

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