Publication ALERT: Jazz at the International Festival of Despair will be published by Broadstone Books on July 15, 2024. Use this direct link to Broadstone to obtain a 20% purchase on the book price:
Jazz at the International Festival of Despair explores the competing narratives of grievance, escape and joy in this era of dissonance. Cultural and political amplifiers have been turned to maximum. Jazz is laced throughout these poems and serves as a vehicle, an ensemble, of legacy, ferocity, transformation and tenderness, played to the downbeats of America in the first quarter of the 21st century. There are sections on nature, spirituality, another war in Europe and the competition for meaning in a disjoining world. I hope readers delve, feel, and re/consider.
What others are saying about Jazz at the International Festival of Despair:
What draws me to Michel Krug’s Jazz at the International Festival of Despair is his skill and commitment to his poetry’s engagement of the beautiful and cacophonous spirit of living in our times. I can feel his serious engagement with finding the choosing the right words for each narrative and emotional situation. His lines are the work and pleasure of poetry. Of being the poet that he surely is.
—Gary Margolis, author of Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems
In one of the poems here, the speaker will plate “tonight’s catch” on his grandmother’s old chipped Wedgewood. I offer that as a metaphor for the whole of Krug’s extraordinary book in which he serves timely themes and issues on leaves of personal and public history along with a sampling of rhythms from Whitman to Coltrane. Jazz at the International Festival of Despair is the work of a master chef and maestro of poetry.
—James Penha, editor, The New Verse News
In Jazz at the International Festival of Despair, Michel Krug uses the musicality of words to entertain us with these poems, while still clearly pointing out the issues and problems of our current lives. No lullaby this collection, but rather a jam session serenading us with what we need to know about where we are right now. The riffs are brilliant and pointed and I hope they get listened to and understood. We need this kind of music.
—Mary Logue, author of Heart Wood
There’s a music of water, a music of music, and a music of collusions throughout Michel Krug’s Jazz at the International Festival of Despair. Played beautifully in lines, songs, melodic bursts and images, albums, groupings, and collectives, the notes of Jazz at the International Festival of Despair render an outrage at injustice, a series of gorgeous realizations, and tremendous strength in word, phrase, and line. Here, the songs conjure the discipline of breath control required to bear the brunt of truth or to steel ourselves against the barrage of life we’re all expected to contend with. There’s a conflation of music, art, and literature building to a crescendo of an expansive now.
—Kurt Cole Eidsvig, author of The Simple Art of Murder
I have had the privilege of publishing Michel Krug’s poetry for several years. His poetry often connects Earth’s natural wonders to the beauty of musical rhythm and those who most magically create it, revealing a poet who understands the importance of splendor, space, and artistry. This new collection provides readers the opportunity to experience the high value of his gifts.
—Joe Maita, musician & editor, Jerry Jazz Musician
I have been avidly reading Krug’s poetry for years, and am thrilled readers get to press play on this passionate inquiry into the ‘uncertainty of certainty’ – right when we need it. With Jazz at the International Festival of Despair, Krug takes the moral universe out for a night on the town. In poetry that is intricate, chock-full of riveting pencil turns, and boldy avant-garde, Krug confronts the provocations of climate change, political turmoil, family lineage, and jazz – from Chopin to Coltrane – with each piece enlivened by the tension of Krug’s vigorous conscience. Enthusiastically recommended for any reader seeking inspiration on aesthetic resilience in the troubling time.
-Elle Aviv Newton, Editor, Poets Reading the News.
