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front cover of metal used for beauty alone

metal used for beauty alone

$16.00

by Claudia Saleeby Savage

Release: August 15, 2023

Only 3 left in stock

SKU: 978-1-956285-39-0 Category: Chapbooks Tag: Claudia Savage

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Description

“Through careful visual composition and an experimental spirit that even the legends of jazz would admire, this chapbook pops off with flushed language and jolting creativity.”

metal used for beauty alone

by Claudia Saleeby Savage

Equal parts experimental bellow and love utterance, Claudia Saleeby Savage’s new collection, metal used for beauty alone, is a plea for music as prayer, music as protest, music as balm, and music as change. Her poetry entrances as she casts Macbeth’s witches to perform jazz spells to urge the musician to rage and energize themselves as they heal the world.

As an added bonus: each book will also have a special link inside that the reader can use to access recordings of the poems read by Claudia, for a full sensory experience.

 

Early Praise for metal used for beauty alone:

metal used for beauty alone, is a three-a.m. jam session. These free form poems levitate off the page. Savage anoints the reader with praise songs, spells, tributes to jazz legends and the quickening of the saxophone’s textural meaning and full register. These witches hold nothing back.

—Jacqueline Johnson, author of A Woman’s Season

Claudia Saleeby Savage’s provocative, transcendent poetry brilliantly captures the energy of live music, providing a perspective that can only come from inside the band onstage. This book is for those who find the systemless system of free jazz relaxing. Those who, like our fearless narrator, have had their hearts “savaged by grief” and “hate boxes.” Along with Pharoah Sanders, John and Alice Coltrane, and the author’s husband and musical partner John Savage, metal used for beauty alone “blows a horn to heaven.”

—Christopher Luna, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA
and founder of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic

metal used for beauty alone proposes and enacts a world where instruments prevail in production and resonance over guns. Through careful visual composition and an experimental spirit that even the legends of jazz would admire, this chapbook pops off with flushed language and jolting creativity. Lively scores (not deadly shots) fire as we read, led by Savage as our witch observer who can “stun the moon,” “hush the sirens,” and “refold our brains” to sort out systemic violence. The poet is a proxy to musicians, together disarming a trigger-happy death grip in favor of the power of clapping sax keys, markings for breath, and collapsing wordplay. Society in metal used for beauty alone is populated by healing dissonance, spiritual jazzers, and live shows, all pistoling a post-military-industrial complex through poetry… inviting us to tarab instead of annihilate.

—Katherine Factor, author of A Sybil Society: Poems

 

About the Author:

Author photo of Claudia Saleeby Savage,
cr: Jane Portnoff

Claudia Saleeby Savage’s writing explores diaspora and dichotomy and has been featured in print, on stage, and in galleries throughout the country. She’s a poet, essayist, and author of Bruising Continents, The Last One Eaten, and the collaboration The Hour of Anjali. Her work lives on the page, but more often with her performance duo Thick In The Throat Honey (2019 semi-finalists for a Creative Capital award on the Syrian refugee crisis). She’s received support from PJCE, RACC, The Black Earth Institute, Jentel, Ucross, the Global Education Center, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poetics are influenced by rabid reading, dancing, Alice Coltrane, and long walks in drippy forests. She works in the field of renewable energy and lives with her husband and daughter in Portland.

She can be found on www.claudiafsavage.com, www.thickinthethroathoney.com, and Instagram @thickinthethroathoney. Though, she’d rather you ask her to coffee.

 

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Additional information

Weight 5 oz
Dimensions 8 × 8 × .2 in
ISBN

978-1-956285-39-0

Pages

52

Wholesale

Bookstores can order via their preferred channels for Ingram, AFTER official release date of Aug 15, 2023.

Sample Poem

The Witches Replace Guns with Saxophones

who is left to praise the world? I never said
my mouth was open for you to pour your sorrow
but you see woman and think vessel

I said: rearrange a horn to heaven
I said: let gospel train your ears
train your ears trane your ears for this train

you said: it’s so hard to eat from this sound
I said: stop being real and sit your ass down
I meant: listen, love, let the breath be round

sit before Pharoah’s beard of clouds
mountain the planets back ‘round the sun
so beautiful the man who isn’t just flesh but stars spun

where you been, my brilliant one?
(so many ruin ruin ruined run)
look as love blows a horn to heaven

he always ends with a nod to
heaven since my brother, my mother
too many live up there

sound too waves down
my king, yes, my king, yes
a shiny bell does resound

let us bow before you
your hallowed ground
it’s not over, she said
it’s just spiritual flow
watch her finger-fire-spark

a tumbling force the night
cannot halt with its dark
she is all goddess bright

I said: I’ll build you a shrine of shimmer
I said: I will

invent a prayer: (((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

undertheholdbackbeatunderthe
pushbonescrossthebonebreath
outtheroomsoundspitsuckthebones
crossthewallthesunsunsitselfas
spaceamidtheshadowspleadlightfall
eyerestandmouthupandupforwhatyou
don’thelphelponcemoreyoureyebraves
depthchargefathomsonicwellsleepdon’t
comesoftdeepsleepleapsealeapandleap
divedive nothought nothought

I will be still

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