The Selected Poems of Steve Dalachinsky

Praise for Steve Dalachinsky’s Selected Poems:

“Who better writes about the ‘i’ than Dalachinsky? He examines, interrogates, accuses, pronounces, forgives, empathizes and laughs at the self via the poem. The Love poems are confessionals. The dexterity in the way he changes pace, rhythm and pitch on the page is like Bird changing keys during a solo. Nobody can employ a refrain to hypnotize like Steve Dalachinsky.“—Tate Swindell, author of Solar Hits

“Dalachinsky is New York City’s greatest poète maudit only he threw off the curse of madness & embraced the excesses & singularity of free jazz as well as art, low, high & everywhere in between to create a body of work that dovetails closely with his fellow travellers Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans & the irreducible Ornette Coleman. A poetry of sensation merging with cosmic ideas spilling from these pages onto your hands, Dalachinsky’s poems are an essential handbook of what it is like to seek the sacred song of jazz in the embarcadero night while hawking records on the street by day & sweeping the steps by grey morning light. Steve’s oeuvre connects us back to the Beats & the mystic revelations of William Blake.“—Jeffrey Joe Nelson, author of Road of a Thousand Wonders

“In my way of seeing it, Steve doesn’t fit into any neat category, academic or otherwise. And being an autodidactic, his reality and art are a homemade reality and art. Steve in a certain way was always working on his language—taking impressions from all manner of phenomenon and mutating and fracturing that into his verse—and a lot of the pieces might have been spontaneous, but there was a method that was constantly refining itself and allowed him to create verse like that. Take each poem as it is; maybe Steve is beyond category.“—Matthew Shipp, free-jazz pianist and author of Black Mystery Pianists and Other Writings

Poet and collagist Steve Dalachinsky (1946-2019) was born and grew up in Brooklyn. He was a quintessential autodidact, known for his involvement with free jazz. His books include The Final Nite Other Poems: Complete Notes from Charles Gayle Notebook, 1987-2007 (2007 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award winner), Where Night and Day Become One: French Poems, A Superintendent’s Eyes, and, with French photographer Jacques Biceglia, Reaching into the Unknown. He collaborated with many musicians on albums and performances in NYC, France, Germany, Austria, and Japan. He also curated shows at the Knitting Factory, was a music critic for The Brooklyn Rail, and sold records on the street. He lived most of his life in Manhattan.

Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and poet born in Nagasaki, Japan. She also translates and writes criticism and essays. Her art, which focuses on pure abstraction, has been shown at many galleries and her books include Anonymous Landscape, PINK, Garden: Selected Haiku, and STUDY, as well as a collaboration with Steve Dalachinsky, FROZEN HEATWAVE. She lives in Manhattan (SoHo).

Michael Ruby is a poet, editor, and journalist. He is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Sounds of Summer in the Country. He also is co-editor of Bernadette Mayer’s Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words and her collaboration with Lewis Warsh, Piece of Cake. He worked for many years as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal and lives in Brooklyn (Park Slope).

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.