Nonfiction
6 x 9, 160 pages
ISBN 978-1-59766-047-1
Cloth: $23.95 ($25.95 in Canada) $10.00
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Sascha Feinstein’s passion for the creative arts and his memories
of the heartbreaking loss of his mother entwined to become
the book Black Pearls. In the spirit of jazz improvisation these
essays are governed by theme and variation more than by strict
chronology, each essay repositioning riffs and choruses of personal
experience within the wider cultural landscapes of literature,
painting, and music. The project began as an exploration into
the archeological nature of memory, but it matured into a far more
complex evocation of personal identity. |
Sascha Feinstein is a poet, essayist, and editor. It was during
his college years that he discovered the crossovers between jazz
and poetry, and a life’s love was forged. In addition to works of
poetry—his recent collection Misterioso won the Hayden Carruth
Award—Feinstein is the author of Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to
the Present and Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz and Literature. He is also the
coeditor, with Yusef Komunyakaa, of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume, The Second Set. He teaches in the
MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and at Lycoming
College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. |
Praise for Black Pearls
“Sascha Feinstein’s Black Pearls is a quiet marvel, an elegy of sorts for his
Swedish mother, for jazz greats Charlie Parker, Mingus, Monk, Coltrane,
and many others, for his seventeen-year-old self, and for New York City
of the late 1970s. With the associative power of a poet, the syncopations
of a musician, and a tactile prose that hearkens back to his visual artist
parents, Feinstein creates a tapestry worth lingering over, savoring, and
returning to for its many moving comforts. ”
—Robin Hemley, author of Invented Eden
“Those who share Sascha Feinstein’s love of jazz and literature will feast
on these exquisitely composed ‘improvisations’ with the keenest pleasure,
as though they were written just for us. But they weren’t: Feinstein’s
mastery of the personal essay, in which recollection and critical acuity are
inseparable, recalls Hazlitt at his narrative best. The alluring modesty of his
sensibility is that of a good and generous man who, in elucidating his own
insights, sharpens ours as well.”
—Gary Giddins, author of Natural Selection and Visions of Jazz |
