If you get a chance check out this new offering by Genny Lim, where you can also pre-order here: https://citylights.com/poetry-city-lights-published/music-without-walls-sf-poet-laureate/
Music Without Walls: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 8
by Genny Lim
Foreword by: Don Bajema
Overview
San Francisco’s Poet Laureate offers an impassioned insider’s personal homage to America’s indigenous music, jazz.
“Her poetry is a flame of truth, joy, compassion–she points to the roads we must take to bring about change and unity. I consider Genny as a key poet for the future.”–Juan Felipe Herrera, MacArthur Fellow, Poet Laureate of the USA Emeritus
Music Without Walls is a love poem and praise song for the pioneers of the indigenous American music genre called jazz. As Lim frames it, jazz is the soundtrack and the musical metaphor of our country’s confrontations with race through time, and the poems collected here pay homage to many of the innovators, such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and others. Lim’s poems capture the essence of their music and of her own personal experience as a listener and a collaborator who has performed onstage with some of the jazz greats, such as Max Roach, Herbie Lewis, Francis Wong, and Jon Jang. This collection will resonate with those already familiar with the music itself and the stories and styles of its various heroes, while readers who are new to them will find a welcoming doorway to an exciting new world.
In The News
Reviews
"In Music Without Walls, Genny Lim poetically illustrates the transcendent presence of Black Music both in the context of everyday life and sweeping world events. Today, as home-grown fascists attempt to disappear American slavery and its immoral legacy from the history books, suppress and eliminate voting rights, divide and conquer citizens via what W.E.B. Dubois called 'the problem of the color line, ' poet Genny Lim gives us her poetic manifesto. More than ever, we need the renegades that the poet praises, 'Who cracked music wide open / Inside the belly of the beast to rip / The funk and junk out of the Blues /This book's an American love story. . . .' Every American should read this book."–Michael Warr, editor, Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin
"I don't think I have ever read anything about jazz that has touched me or revealed as much about the music in quite the way that these poems do. . . . Every poem is a musical portrait, a love letter, an invitation, a call and response. There is such a depth of understanding and a wisdom and love for the artists who have inspired this work."–Sumi Tonooka, pianist and composer
"Genny's poems evoke the spirits of giants, masters who've left us in the physical realm but who live on in our hearts thanks to their recordings and to the inspiring poetry of writers and poets like Genny Lim."–Art Sato, "In Your Ear," KPFA
