joelpeckham.com Blog

From the publisher:

“The brilliant and intense poetry in Joel Peckham’s tour-de-force, MUCH, can not fail to move us. The poems are so rich and deep with meaning that they resonate emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and even physically. The use of long lines and overflowing enjambment moves our reading along at an exhilarating pace and is done so artfully that the pure act of reading this book delivers a palpable pleasure. This book is brimming with novel use of language, but never to the detriment of feeling and understanding acutely the details of the poetic epiphanies, as well as the reverberating fulcrum at each poem’s heart. The imagery is vivid and tactile, securely situated in recollection that is at times tragic and painful and at other times joyful and ecstatic. This is such a good book. I loved it. I have read it at least a dozen times. So, grab something soothing to drink, sit back in the overstuffed chair and prepare yourself for a read that, with its insights and compassion can’t fail to transform your mood, your day and perhaps your life. The miracle of exceptional poetry.”

To Purchase

Joel Peckham’s Bone Music does many things so well: it invokes the blue tones and rhythms of Charlie Parker, and the improvisations suggested by “Prologue” move the music and rhythms, “layering one upon another,” throughout the book. But, the poet is the musician, the horn blower, who must ever be “Waiting. Wondering where the next beat would come, if it would come . . . a pulse, a roll to bring him back into the song completely new.” This sets the stage for the concert of prose poems that follow, and in Bone Music the reader will find the best book of prose poems since Karl Shapiro’s The Bourgeois Poet from the 1960s. In “The Wreckage That We Travel In,” he writes, “The world must take us by surprise,” and, indeed, we are given the details, as if they were notes played, of surprise. If it’s not the wreckage of automobiles, it may be the wreckage of lives and what to do with them. Bone Music takes us through such interludes and more. As Peckham writes in “Arrhythmia,” this is “what listening means,” the music “finding in the storm, the harmony, the single tap of rain among the many rhythms, the molecule of silence beating like a heart

An interview with Eliot Parker, at CHAPTERS

With Rachael and Darius I will be reading from new work at Empire Books as part of a Writers Can Read Event.

The reading will be on Monday, February 15 at Empire Books, Pullman Square, Huntington WV.
The event begins at 7pm and will run until 8:30 pm.

You can access the event page on Facebook HERE

By Forward Reviews. You can access it HERE.

You can read a preview here

Click Here

My new collection of poetry, God’s Bicycle, has just appeared in paperback and kindle from Futurcycle Press. I will devote a new page to it soon. For now here are a few links as well the title poem and cover art:

To Purchase At Amazon

Facebook Page

Press Release

God’s Bicycle

God is peddling a bicycle down
Highway 32, traveling west toward
Cincinnati against traffic (of course).
The bicycle is red—one of the sit-down,
layback types with three wheels and
a basket on the front filled with groceries:
local eggs, milk, cheese, some bacon
(He hasn’t been Kosher in years). A Bengals
pennant blows from the back (Who
Knew?!). He looks much like you’d expect
—a fat, elderly, white guy with a soot-stained
beard, and the slightly crazed and haggard look

of the father of many (many) children when
the children figure out he loves them
and that really, there is little he can do—
a time-out here. A spanking there.
Even if the burning pit is real, he will not
drop them. So they fight and bicker,
pull at his ears, laugh at shouts and idle
threats, beat the dog, masturbate on
the toilet, in the closet, in the basement,
on his favorite couch when he’s at work

and leave the stains for him to clean.
Saying, I know what you’ve been up to
I’m everywhere does nothing (since
the Puritans) but make them exhibitionists
or hypocrites, at best, voyeurs. And what
did all that watching do to him at last
but make his eyes sore. So he leans back
in his pajama pants and flannels, peddling
his bicycle. His chin raised skyward so
he can’t see into the windows, can’t
meet the hungry stares, and it is
a miracle how he avoids collisions

(mostly) and keeps the world in orbit.
There is enough to do (Get out
of the way you crazy old), switching
gears from high to low, muttering,
as he goes, I love you all I love
you I love you I love you all I
love you

It’s been a real pleasure to have this opportunity to talk about writing with such a talented author. Check out Part II of the interview here: The Interview Spot with Derek B. Miller

Hello Everyone!

It looks as if I will be taking on a new job in the fall. I have just signed and returned an offer to Marshall University to become an Assistant Professor of Regional Literature and Creative Writing. This means that I will be with family everyday. No more commuting!

If you get a chance, check out me interview regarding Resisting Elegy at Derek B. Miller’s The Interview Spot: