Jim Daniels - Böcker

"Show and Tell" is a varied, complex collection of poems, serious and wise, wry and often profound. Jim Daniels' work has become both more experimentally dramatic and more poetically sure of itself.

In Line for the Exterminator is the final collection in Jim Daniels' trilogy of books explaining the urban working-class landscape. Daniels, who grew up near the Eight Mile Road boundary between Detroit and suburban Warren, Michigan, walks the razor's edge of the borderline in this collection, examining complex issues of race and class that are a part of daily life there.The title poem, ""In Line for the Exterminator,"" sets the ironic tone for this collection, examining a group of people waiting in line for a sinister-sounding amusement-park ride. Daniels presents blue-collar culture both in and out of the workplace, showing its profound influence on the lives of workers and their families. As in ""Places/Everyone and M-80"", Daniels uses his character Digger to show the effects of work on outside life, following Digger into retirement from his factory job and into his struggle to find a new future. In addition, Daniels deals frankly with the specter of urban violence that haunts the community and threatens to tear it apart. Local heroes, from professional wrestler the Sheik to the contemporary rapper Eminem, also appear as touchstones for the community's complex view of itself.How do ordinary citizens sustain hope and dignity in the face of economic and societal upheaval? How do people avoid the mirages offered by drugs and alcohol, or the intoxication of guns and crime? In ""Line for the Exterminator"" offers no easy answers but presents searing portraits of individuals struggling with these questions and finding small victories and moments of consolation in their everyday lives. Those interested in poetry, depictions of working-class city life, and Detroit social history will enjoy this significant volume.

The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work-putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places-and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles-his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with ""hamburger surprise"" and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, ""Gun/Shy,"" centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.

While there have been countless books written about Detroit, none have captured its incredible musical history like this one. This collection of poems and lyrics covers numerous genres including jazz, blues, doo-wop, Motown, classic rock, punk, hip-hop, and techno. Detroit artists have forged the paths in many of these genres, producing waves of creative energy that continue to reverberate across the country and around the world. While documenting and celebrating this part of Detroit’s history, this book captures the emotions that the music inspired in its creators and in its listeners. The range of contributors speaks to the global impact of Detroit’s music scene—Grammy winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and poet laureates all come together in this rich and varied anthology, including such icons as Eminem, June Jordan, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Rita Dove, Jack White, Robbie Robertson, Paul Simon, Nikki Giovanni, Philip Levine, Sasha Frere-Jones, Patricia Smith, Billy Bragg, Andrei Codrescu, Toi Derricotte, and Cornelius Eady.

In poems selected from his long career, Jim Daniels focuses on Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, where issues of class and race and justice play out in the streets and kitchens and backyards and garages of the Americans trying to live and make a living there. Known for his courage, clarity, and accessibility, Daniels examines the tension between our idealized country and the messier cultural and economic divides, often focusing on those who can’t afford or have access to “magic.”

Jim Daniels' collection bears witness to a life both mis- and well-spent: to the family, remembered and new; to the melancholy pull of drugs and casual sex; to growing up; and to the only tenable way of growing old, which is to embrace every small joy even as one laments its brevity. Indeed, Night with Drive-By Shooting Stars rages not against the dying of light but the dying fall itself—against poetic and existential complacency. "Louder, kids," says Daniels in the beautiful "Cold Seed:" "daddy’s dying."

A poet of the working-class and city streets, Jim Daniels's fourteenth poetry collection travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence. Out here, silence scrapes its knuckles in an attempt at prayer. Jim Daniels is Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Melon. Poetry editor for the scholarly journal Labor: A Working Class History of America, his awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Awards and the Brittingham Prize for Poetry.