Joe Hannabach

Stones In Me Pocket Joe Hannabach

This is a poetry of love found and lost, of bitterness and humility, desire and sometimes a state beyond love. A poetry that laughs at tragedy, cries at beauty, and sings in the face of loss, written with the sensibilities of a mature man who remembers what being young was like. Hannabach, an unregenerate sailor, a life-long student, and a deeply rooted jazz musician, speaks with a voice that strikes many of life's major chords and a few minor ones. The poet's fresh, direct, honest pieces are quite readable, often irreverently funny, and laced with a self-depreciating irony and wry humor that deal with life at its most deadly serious moments as well as its bungling hilarities. An inveterate seeker after "meaning" in his life as well as his writings, his simultaneous awareness of the absurd makes for some eminently engaging reading. The pieces reveal a salty, brave, self-effacing man who's lived through multiple emotional debacles, some small triumphs and private glories, and the intellectual honesty to translate it all into some damn good poetry.