“It’s a late winter’s afternoon on the top of Cross Hill, with Hardcastle Crags on one side and Colden Valley on the other. Down in their depth of hibernating trees and gritstone slabs, darkness isn’t coming down — it’s rising like a cold damp tide.” So begins Jay Jeff Jones’s uncommonly rich meditation on the poetic afterlife. It arrives nicely timed to an upcoming celebration of Sylvia Plath for what would have been her 90th birthday.

“SHOOTER: A Fragment” is just out from Moloko Print in its new chapbook series. It begins: “Jerry Crane did not believe in perfection any more than he believed in his real name. If he had, he would never have worked as a shooter for the tabloids. Crane was born Jiri Kiranek, a truth-telling fabulist, tall and lean, a refugee from wealth and privilege. In his younger days he was often high speed, always riffing, full of imagination, his bitter humor tinged with sardonic taunts. Now not quite in middle age, he still had a facile street-smart intellect. He told ambling, long-limbed tales. It was a peculiar form of truth-telling.”

Lou Schneider liked his manuscript of ‘Stamboul Blues’ and got him started as a published writer. It was the cold junky eye, the alienation and disillusionment, the unemphatic humor—acid but deadpan—that appealed to Schneider, though perhaps I’m projecting what appeals to me.

‘Shall we / be lighthearted / to ward off / the shitstorm? / Tra-la la-la. / Or shall we / bite our elbows / to the bone? / Tra-la.