by Jayne Lyn Stahl

112 Pages, 5½ x 8½

Library of Congress Control Number:  2010923061

ISBN:  978-1-935520-26-9

Publication Date:  02/17/2010

Press Release

Cover Art:  George Washington Bridge, HDR
by © 2009 Jay Dorfman  | jaydorfman.arloartists.com

   

This title is out of print.

Riding with Destiny, Jayne Lyn Stahl's first published collection, is a high voltage volume of poetry that flirts with the boundaries between sacred and profane, self and other, the erotic and transcendent in ways that are fresh, and continually surprise. Her vibrant imagery combines with streetwise wit, and is merciless in its unwavering penetration of social hypocrisy. Stahl combines a rich sense of history with the legacy of surrealism. Her work has attracted the attention of poets like Paul Blackburn and Allen Ginsberg, as well as J.M. Coetzee who praised her "poised, wry humor." Riding with Destiny combines both Whitman's affirmation of a larger self, one that is all-embracing with poetry that takes us to the edge, not merely to taste danger, but to dance the dance of life.

Recommendations

Jayne Stahl's cunning observations and whiz kid reflections make Riding with Destiny a most welcome and keen companion.

—Ed Asner

Here is a poet who embraces a literary heritage from Rimbaud to Ginsberg, from Yeats to Bob Dylan, and makes a street-wise, sexy music all her own.

—Aram Saroyan

Riding With Destiny shows us that poetry can be both gritty and luminous, spare and yet full of resonant meanings, street-smart and book-smart in the same stunning moment. From Googie's coffee shop on the Sunset Strip to the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Jayne Lyn Stahl captures more than one vision of American life in her prismatic collection verse. As the poet herself puts it: "jayne has got/her own parfum," and it's the scent of love and longing, fear and fury.

—Jonathan Kirsch

What a mitzvah, poet-activist Jayne Lyn Stahl's debut collection, the knock-out power of poems like "Walt Whitman's Fly," & "Managing Gravity." A richly generous, wide-ranging collection of small & large works, powerful & sly & of deep knowing & articulation.

—David Meltzer

Jayne Stahl is like a river bending at the Dell dementia in our head. She writes with the umavoidable double negative, no triple positive. I love her work. Her poetry lacks piety, and that is its flexibile starkness.

—David Shapiro