Manhattan Beatitude, 1997 is a graphic (illustrated) book-length poem rooted in the people and landscape of Washington Square Park in New York City. Coppoc uses a blend of traditional Biblical and Tanakhic forms to unite the sacred, secular and profane elements of the City, the narrator, the park, and the events surrounding Allen Ginsberg’s death in late spring, 1997.
Illustrated by Amy Dixon.
Available now at Amazon.com and all major booksellers.
· Format: Perfect-Bound Trade Paperback
· Publisher: One Small Bird Press
· Release date: January 1st, 2010
· ISBN: 978-0615293684
· List Price: $13.95
Reliquary is about transformation and survival - mostly about survival - survival from love, survival from death - doing only what we know how to do: "we will ignore the shadow of death, draw what light we can from what time we have." We look at the wounds of the survivors and watch the wounds we cannot see drive them through their lives -- their struggle and insanity may well be our own. The degree of autobiography, however palpable its force, is unimportant because the intensely human action becomes your action -- you are drawn into and through allegory, and you give it flesh and skin as you recognize yourself.
The poems in the first third of the book define multiple starting points for journeys that converge on the one-act play at its center: manhattan beatitude, set in NYC on the day of Allen Ginsberg's death. At its core the play forges a compromise between the hammer of bitter reality and the anvil of spiritual transformation, the clang ringing in the repeated phrase "blessed be . . . . " From this funnel of transformation, in which the down-and-out writer becomes a replacement for the trickster drug-dealing geezer, the poetry returns and passes down a single-lane road through love and death. At the end, regardless of where you started from, you end up thankful that you have survived, and you learn to appreciate your luck and your stamina.
Available now at Amazon.com and all major booksellers.
· Format: Perfect-Bound Trade Paperback
· Publisher: Fractal Edge Press
· Release date: January 4th, 2010
· ISBN: 1-933126-19-1
· List Price: $15.00
Blood, Sex, & Prayer
This is a work of Fusion Poetry.
It is meant, as all good poetry is meant,
to be read out loud.
Available now at Amazon.com and all major booksellers.
· Format: Perfect-Bound Trade Paperback
· Publisher: Fractal Edge Press
· Release date: August 31, 2005
· ISBN: 1-933126-22-1
· List Price: $12.00
