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HOW I CAME TO LOVE JAZZ
Poems By Pyllis Becker

How I Came to Love Jazz traces a young woman’s bittersweet, often humorous, journey toward self discovery and acceptance. The backdrop is the segregated Kansas City of the '70s, where jazz music is more valued than the musicians who perform it; where black physicians, such as her father, are excluded from the AMA and banned from the staffs of so-called white hospitals; and where Angela Davis becomes the icon for a generation of college students trying to find their way in a maze of white power. Despite the polarization around her and the personal trials she encounters and surmounts over the years, she eventually finds a blossoming–if provisional–peace in herself, her family, and the “rhythms and riffs” of the city she comes to accept as "home." These are powerful and inspiring poems.

"These wonderful poems by Phyllis Becker continue the tradition of original voices that come from Kansas City. In using jazz to animate her poetry, she joins Big Joe Turner, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie “Bird” Parker and Ralph Ellison as part of the orchestra of important cultural sounds springing forth from Kansas City. Her evocative poems are filled with epiphanies so necessary to understand the human condition and to illuminate the terrain in her own unique vision. Phyllis Becker is now part of this blessed group. ‘Jump for Joy’!"

—Bruce Ricker, film director and producer of The Last of the Blue Devils and Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends

“Phyllis Becker’s fine collection of poems, How I Came to Love Jazz, is about sophistication: domestic, social, sexual, philosophic, and aesthetic. Each poem initiates its persona into a new, often troubled, but always evolving world view, as in ‘Middle Child’: ‘I have learned how to/live with that edge,/like a rim of a bowl/or a cornered edge of a box,/a part but not center,/contained, circumspect/well-defined and sharp.’ And as each small poetic drama defines its own variety of sophistication, Becker chooses her words with exactness and restraint, thereby allowing her emotional insights to enlighten her lucky readers.”

—Philip Miller, editor of The Same, and author of Branches Snapping

Phyllis Becker’s poems have been published in numerous literary magazines, including Fathers: A Collection of Poems (St.Martin's Press); Sacred Stones (Adams Media, F+W Publications); The Kansas City Star; and Chance of a Ghost: An Anthology of Contemporary Ghost Poems (Helicon Nine Editions). Her chapbook, Walking Naked Into Sunday, was published by Wheel of Fire Press. Her poems have been set to jazz on the compact disc, Poetry of Love, which was produced, recorded, and arranged by national jazz vocalist Angela Hagenbach. A graduate of Howard University, she works in human services and is on the board of The Writer Place, a literary center in Kansas City, Missouri. She is involved in literary outreach to schools in the metro area. She is coordinator of the Riverfront Readings series, which features local and regional writers.

Publication Date: 1 August 2008
Pages: 216; Size: 6 x 9
ISBN 978-1-884235-41-2
$9.95; Paper

send check or money order to Helicon Nine Editions at the following address:

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WHAT'S RIGHT ABOUT WHAT'S WRONG
Poems By Donna Trussell

"Every poem in this collection is a five star, worthy of the explicator's science and the sensitive reader's tears. Her poems of grief unavoidable, sustained, or in progress, join those of Emily Dickinson in their strength and assured longevity."

—David Ray, author of Sam's Book

Donna Trussell's poems are lean, and brilliant. They swerve and startle, the way life does, but somehow better. WHAT'S RIGHT ABOUT WHAT'S WRONG—you'll turn down corners of pages, copy poems for friends, come back and back again to images so potent and penetrating they feel almost eerie in their stunning beauty.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

If Donna Trussell speaks to us “from the fragile net of the living,” she is spoken to by ghosts still animated by “the look of longing.” That’s what’s right about what’s wrong, that equation — life the dividend, death the divisor — “that solves,” Trussell tells us in the title poem, “to an infinite fraction / that can’t be right, / but is.”

—H.L. Hix

These poems, passionate and sometimes angry, sting. And though succinct, they grow large in the silences they force us to listen to.

—Jo McDougal

Donna Trussell grew up in Texas. Today she lives in Kansas City with her husband. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, North American Review, TriQuarterly and other journals. In the past she has worked as an editor, film critic and teacher.

Her short story “Fishbone” appeared in Fiction of the Eighties, New Stories From the South, Growing Up Female and other anthologies. “Fishbone” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for Best American Short Stories and was performed as a play in Seattle and as a monologue in Dallas. Today “Fishbone” can be found online at www.donnatrussell.com and in the SMU Press book Texas Bound II.

In 2001 Trussell was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Five years later Newsweek published her essay “Remember Me as a Writer, Not a Survivor.”

Publication Date: 1 August 2008
Pages: 62; Size: 6 x 9
ISBN 978-1-884235-40-9
$9.95; Paper

send check or money order to Helicon Nine Editions at the following address: