Bone Music

Product Description

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.”

Review

In Bone Music, Peckham continues his excavation of grief, sharing a full spectrum of emotions in which he maps the contours of love, joy, fear, sadness, loss, and abundance. These incantatory poems explore both sound and movement in their making of meaning, as readers become in many ways seated in a raft while wave after wave of ocean rocks and lulls and spins–just as any good music does.–Daniel Lassell,
Aquifer

A superb collection of poems that are haunted by grief yet touched by grace. —
Kirkus Starred Review

From the Back Cover

“Everything once touched must carry ascar,” says Joel Peckham in “Witness,” one of the bone-wrenchingpoems in this brilliant collection that grips a reader by the shoulders, by thepelvis, with rapid-paced, musical writing that swims through the blood.”How do you let go an emptiness, an ache,” asks Peckham in “The Wreckage That We Travel In.” But this is not a book only of sorrow, ofgrief, but of wisdom and recovery. “We will keep going forward until it istoo late to turn,” Peckham writes in “Going Sideways.” In “In Case of Emergency,” he speaks of “a falling apart that might be the sound of shattering or another kind of opening that space we make and in making still might reach across.” Bone Music is a survival guide, a necessary book for our time and for time to come.
–Wendy Barker, author of Gloss

It’s right that this BONE MUSIC opens with homage paid to Night in Tunisia.  These poems ring and pulse with riffs Charlie Parker would’ve admired.  And within this music there are stories that unfold with an uncanny ability to truly re-focus our hearing and seeing of the world. Even a simple fender-bender takes on dimensions of epic. What’s more, Peckham provides character studies as rich as any novelist’s and all with a dark beauty illuminating the poems much like the brilliant sky holds in place Munch’s horrific, yet mesmerizing scream.  These poems, too, will not let you go– of that I’m sure: … “everything once touched must carry a scar.”  This is as impressive collection as I’ve read in years.

–Marc Harshman, author of Woman in Red Anorak, BlueLynx Prize winner, and poet laureate of West Virginia

About the Author

JOEL PECKHAM is an Assistant Professor of Regional Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University. A scholar of American Literature and a creative writer as well as a former Fulbright Scholar, Joel’s reviews, essays, scholarly articles, and poetry have been published in numerous journals throughout The United States and Canada.