Alan Catlin

Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell

Herausgeber: McDannold, Michele

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The smartass bartender, narrator, is locked in a bar with thousands of uninvited guests. The jukebox is virtual which means it is practically infinite and people can and will play music Loud for hours while the hapless, somewhat hard of hearing bartender tries to make the best of this "disco inferno" ( though the music is rarely if ever remotely disco like). Our bartender refers to the jukebox as the infernal machine and the guests are demons with unlimited credit. Snarky, irreverent and based on actual firsthand experience. Alan Catlin worked for the better part of 34 years in his unchosen profession as a barman in and around the greater Albany, NY area. He has published dozens of chapbooks and full-length books focusing on his work and the people he met while laboring in the trenches of bar warfare. "Like a sequel to his previous collection of bar poems, Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged, Alan Catlin's new collection begins, appropriately, in Hell, among those condemned to short, sad, violent lives of pain, humiliation, and self-destruction. There are many doors to Hell, he confides. "The one you choose is always / the wrong one." The whores, the drug addicts, the gang members, the "karaoke killers": they've all walked in through different entrances but wound up in the same place. Fate? In "Maybe it was meant," Catlin philosophizes: "to be, to end this way, / a life spent on the edge / always playing a loser's / hand but pretending /otherwise, and fooling / no one." Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell has moments of humor and scenes of poignance, all so familiar, all so human, all so doomed, all so damned. Belly up to the bar, have a seat. Drink it all in!"-Charles Rammelkamp, author of The Trapeze of Your Flesh "This the kind of place the children and grandchildren of the Dead-End Kids would go. They'd call themselves something like the Wild Bunch or the Wrecking Crew and the bartender, good to his word, would be taking notes and writing it all down. If you see yourself in these poems, it's your own fault."-Elenora Fagan, poet, lyricist "If hell opened up all its' gates, gave every good citizens a couple of hundred bucks to spend at happy hour; they'd end up at this bar, super-charged and ready to go, making up for lost time."-Patrick Allen, occasional poet

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Roadside Press
• Seitenzahl: 130
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Mai 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 7mm
• Gewicht: 174g
• ISBN-13: 9798990230910
• Artikelnr.: 70254533

Autorenporträt

Alan Catlin has been publishing poetry, fiction, reviews and the odd collage in littles, independents, and university magazines since the 70's. He can say, with complete confidence, that he is the only poet in the world to have published in Random Weirdness, Tray Full of Lab Mice, Yammering Twits, The Seattle Review, Wisconsin Review, Descant, The Literary Review and Wordsworth's Socks. He has won several chapbook contests including the Slipstream one and been a finalist in several major university book contests. He lost count after thirty Pushcart nominations and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Rhysling and Bram Stoker awards. As a poet of many voices, he has published full-length collection reflecting his work as professional barman that included the recent triptych of Carpe Diem books: Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged (Roadside Press), Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell (Roadside Press) and Last Call for Lazarus (Impspired). His American Odyssey and Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press examined the American Experience. The third in this series of art and life was published by Dos Madres as Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh. His life and times of Diane Arbus was a labor of love brought to fruition by Kelsay Books as How Will the Heart Endure? An eleven-chapbook series of "movie poems" was recently completed with three volumes of three chapbooks each ,plus two others separate little books including the Slipstream Contest Winner, Blue Velvet. The working title of those was Hollyweird, and extended a year's long project of social commentary disguised as bar poems called Alien Nation. A covid project of numbered prose like snap shot poems was published by Dos Madres as Memories Too, and represents what happens when the narrative impulse dies in isolation. His fictional memoir, a retirement project that began and finished before Covid, Chaos Management, was published by Alien Buddha. He is currently culling his vast archives for the forgotten and the lost over decades of creation. A recent discovery assembled into book form is The Work Anxiety Poems which includes uncollected work experience poems, and actual anxiety dreams about that experience, all of which happened after he retired.