I Was The Jukebox

"Sandra Beasley eschews the poet-as-speaker convention and unleashes a collection teeming with the inanimate, the anachronistic, and the animal kingdom. In these poems Beasley approaches the world with all of its wild music, Wednesday compromises, migrating battlefields, and lovelorn minotaurs with clarity, humor, and compassion."--

Grab some coins for the jukebox, and get ready for a colorful, time-traveling, musical tale about family and courage. A mysterious jukebox, old vinyl records, and cryptic notes on music history, are Shaheen's only clues to her father's abrupt disappearance. She looks to her cousin, Tannaz, who seems just as perplexed, before they both turn to the jukebox which starts...glowing? Suddenly, the girls are pulled from their era and transported to another time! Keyed to the music on the record, the jukebox sends them through decade after decade of music history, from political marches, to landmark concerts. But can they find Shaheen’s dad before the music stops? This time-bending magical mystery tour invites readers to take the ride of their lives for a coming-of-age adventure.

“[Beasley’s] lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep.”—Abigail Deutsch, Poetry The winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize—“These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo, prize citation from “The Piano Speaks” For an hour I forgot my fat self, my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment. For an hour I forgot my fear of rain. For an hour I was a salamander shimmying through the kelp in search of shore, and under his fingers the notes slid loose from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs that took root in the mud.

The author recounts his journeys throughout the United States, in search of the ideal jukebox and the treasures of old popular, rock, and country music it would hold

The Jukebox Queen of Malta is an exquisite and enchanting novel of love and war set on an island perilously balanced between what is real and what is not. It's 1942 and Rocco Raven, an intrepid auto mechanic turned corporal from Brooklyn, has arrived in Malta, a Mediterranean island of Neolithic caves, Copper Age temples, and fortresses. The island is under siege, full of smoke and rubble, caught in the magnesium glare of German and Italian bombs. But nothing is as it seems on Malta. Rocco's living quarters are a brothel; his commanding officer has a genius for turning the war's misfortunes into personal profit; and the Maltese people, astonishingly, testify to the resiliency of the human spirit. When Rocco meets the beautiful and ethereal Melita, who delivers the jukeboxes her cousin builds out of shattered debris, they are drawn to each other by an immediate passion. And, it is their full-blown affair that at once liberates and imprisons Rocco on the island. In this mesmerizing novel, music and bombs, war and romance, the jukebox and the gun exist in arresting counterpoint in a story that is a profound and deeply moving exploration of the redemptive powers of love.

boxs from the classic era. Includes vintage advertising of the period and an appendix of detailed notes on each jukebox. Full-color illustrations.

From its indefinite beginnings through its broad commercialization and endless reinterpretation, American rock-and-roll music has been preoccupied with an end-of-the-world mentality that extends through the whole of American popular music. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Edward Whitelock and David Janssen trace these connections through American music genres, uncovering a mix of paranoia and hope that characterizes so much of the nation’s history. From the book’s opening scene, set in the American South during a terrifying 1833 meteor shower, the sense of doom is both palpable and inescapable; a deep foreboding that shadows every subsequent development in American popular music and, as Whitelock and Janssen contend, stands as a key to understanding and explicating America itself. Whitelock and Janssen examine the diversity of apocalyptic influences within North American recorded music, focusing in particular upon a number of influential performers, including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Coltrane, Devo, R.E.M., Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Whitelock and Janssen reveal apocalypse as a permanent and central part of the American character while establishing rock-and-roll as a true reflection of that character.

Boubacar, a 15-year-old boy from Africa, moves to a rural Mississippi Delta town and soon visits The Celestial Grocery, the city center presided over by a cranky second-generation Chinese proprietor and his equally cranky jukebox. The tie that binds these lives is American popular music.