Misterioso (Poems)

Chosen from over a thousand manuscript submissions, Misterioso is steeped in the biographies, history, and sounds of jazz music, using a distinctly American idiom to explore personal relationships. Whether writing about John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk (the inspiration for the book's title), Feinstein transcends mere portraiture by emphasizing the meditative and sonorous qualities of jazz music. Feinstein's insistent voice and music are a welcome addition to contemporary American poetry.

"Feinstein links memory, feeling, autobiography, official history with imagination the same way recording engineers ingeniously mix, shape, and color sound....It is bloood and kin, eruptions and rushes of love, scratches of silence--sometimes barely audible between beats--that make these walking, talking poems leap to life and burst into flame."-Al Young

"Feinstein's debut merits the first Hayden Carruth Emerging Poets Award because the poems in it are good, sturdy work and because so many of them touch on one of Carruth's passions, jazz....Feinstein writes excellently about other things--his mother's death, cremations he has witnessed, his love for his Asian wife and their children--but the jazz poems uniquely communicate what it is like to live with music one adores."-Ray Olson, Booklist

Sascha Feinstein, winner of the first annual Hayden Carruth Award, has published poems in numerous magazines and journals, such as American Poetry Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. He is the co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set, and the author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. He is an Associate Professor of English at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.