Joe Poems | John Roche
Signed author copy
Hand stitched paperback, 6 x 9
60 pages with spine
Author's Note
These poems are all ten-lines each. I took Alan Casline's advice and set a word-count restriction. It was going to be eighty words, but I quickly found myself cheating and so raised the debt ceiling to one-hundred words. Resemblances to people alive or dead are purely intentional, though each of Joe's incarnations is, it goes without saying, drawn from multiple sources, most of which I'm not aware of. These are tall tales meant to stretch the neck of credulity, in the American humorist tradition. One of the poems alludes to Whitman's claim to have fathered six illegitimate children in New Orleans, which confused an audience member at one of my readings. Of course, Joe is as big a liar as Whitman or Twain. Doesn't matter if there are scorpions in Joe's Montana as there are just as likely to be dinosaurs.
Praise for Joe Rides Again
"In a unique and quirky form of his own, ten-line poems with a 100-word limit, Joe the Poet spins his tall tales, his hair floating and his eyes flashing as he rambles, tongue in cheek, from town to town to the delight of those he's touched and are waiting to be touched again. Joe morphs into a variety of idiosyncratic wanderers and Josephina, Don Quixote-like dudes and who knows- he could be any poet messiah--after a few poems the reader won't know what to expect as Roche takes the reader on an odyssey from Montana to Paris to Penny Lane. The poems are witty, terse, darkly and oddly funny, often with a mild twist at the end as in Joe disputing academic rigor. References seem right for the kaleidoscope of changing settings-like Shakespeare and Co., the Piggly Wiggly stores, etc. The poems are fun to read and must have been fun to write.
– Lyn Lifshin, Vienna, Virginia
“Roche's The Joe Poems: the Continuing Saga of Joe the Poet refracts his vibrant, unique and far-flung life experience through the prism of a mind on lyric. The result is a fantastic realism that sticks with you. The new forms he uses here sport a command of the poetic matching his mastery of historical past, creating a staying power for the soul of 'Joe the Poet' to be forever balanced on the cusp of the borderlands-but the best thing is simply that it's all a wide angle on the great pageant and turns out Joe's a pretty good guide.”
– G.E. Schwartz, Henrietta, NY
"A rewarding read. There's a lot of erudition beneath the surface of these unassuming little gems."
– Charlie Rossiter, Oak Park, IL
