The Jersey Slide - by Danny Shot (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An irreverent and unapologetically Jersey meditation on friendship, family, aging, and gentrification.

In The Jersey Slide, veteran poet and proud Hoboken resident Danny Shot revels in the quotidian richness of his experience as a first-generation American and child of German Jewish refugees. Recounting tall tales and inside jokes, local histories, and family sagas, the poems in this collection sidle up to you like the loquacious barfly at your local dive, revealing unexpected drama, pathos, and humor in landscapes and faces you thought you knew. Written with pugnacious language and intimate humor, The Jersey Slide celebrates the unvarnished, working-class beauty of a diverse and scrappy community.

Review Quotes

Danny Shot's beautifully vulnerable poetry is a splendid, multi-barreled blues song DuBois called double consciousness. As Shot says we live in "the land of God and Google," a place where this poet, American and Jewish, in New York and in Jersey, on the page and off the wall, splits his chest in half again and again. There we see him, family members and friends and memories come and gone, his words the autobiography of a man who is not only one of our finest poets, but also a living, breathing record of Punk and Plath, of loss and love.

--Kevin Powell, GRAMMY-nominated poet; author of 16 books

Danny Shot's poems are both epic and exquisitely personal - there are echoes of Whitman in the vast scope of his work, in the music and the transcendence, in the breathtaking glory he finds in the deceptively diurnal; of O'Hara, in his self-effacement and intimate humor; of Yeats in the breadth of his unique language which embraces the spiritual nature of his earthly environment. But his poetry is most assuredly his own, with deft twists of wit quickly swirling into stunning, profound truths. The Palisades, the Mets, Hoboken's late beloved Maxwell's - all are celestial in Danny Shot's world, and he continually surprises with epiphanic lines that pierce the heart, and swiftly, miraculously, we see ourselves.

--Tammy Faye Starlite, author of Chanteuse

About the Author

Danny Shot is the author of Works, also published by CavanKerry Press. Danny Shot was a longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot, an arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. More information can be found on his website: dannyshot.com