In Moonglow á Go-Go, Smith gives the reader a sweeping biopic of an extraordinary and exuberant life written with heart and humor and insight as only Joan Jobe Smith can. After a near-fatal, devastating attack by a husband, she survived to support her 3 young children by working 7 years as a go-go girl in the 1960s golden age of rock and roll, becoming an award-winning, internationally-published poet who chronicled her hectic go-go years, her Texan depression-era parents, the wild fun-filled 1960s-70s California lifestyle, her friendship with Charles Bukowski and much more in these lyrical, straight-talking, delightful and imaginative poems shining and dancing with moonglow that take you through her amazing life and leave you moved and uplifted. |
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The poems of Joan Jobe Smith have the reality of force properly put down on paper — a game girl — she cuts herself loose into the stratosphere — a strange woman, a strange, good, basic woman.
—Charles Bukowski
Thank God for Joan Jobe Smith. She is one of our wisest and truest poets, and one of the great wonders of the small press revolution she helped kick-start nearly five decades ago. Her poems read like firecrackers and heart attacks and CPR and the Roman candles Jack Kerouac shouted about in On The Road. She tells her beautiful and terrible and life-affirming truths in long, rolling, jazzed up, beautifully-crafted glitter-lines that beckon like the jeweled interstates of her California. A Texas native living at the edge of America, she go-go danced in Hollywood and watched the sailors harbor in Long Beach. Joan knows America, and her work belongs with the best narrative poets that America has ever produced. Joan is at the table with Charles Bukowski and Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver and Langston Hughes. Ask Joan what happens to a dream deferred and she'll tell us true. She understands the pain of being alive and how living through the pain and telling the story of survival allows us beauty. Like Whitman, she contains multitudes. She is a parent trying to afford her children. She is a wife trying to live with impossible men. She is a go-go dancer trying to glisten and shake everything she has to make a living. In telling the beautiful, heartbreaker, blood-honest moments she knows so well, Joan Jobe Smith stands up for all of us. "Stand up friend, with me," the poet Ed Field once said. Joan Jobe Smith stands up, with you, with me, with all of us who have had a rough go in this life. She's a friend, a confidant, a beacon in the dark night. If you've ever been a daughter or a mother, or known a daughter or a mother, if you've ever been a wife or a lover, or if you've ever had a wife or a lover, if you've ever had to wake up to a job you knew you were better than, if you've ever woken up dreaming of a reason to go on, read Joan Jobe Smith. Please. I implore you. She is telling your story and my story and our story in a way we've never heard it, in a way you and I know is true, and in a way that will change the way we can see and survive this one and precious life.
—Lori Jakiela, author of Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe
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