Boombox Serenade by Joey Nicoletti

“We dig in. We chomp/our sumptuous feast….” Yes, Joey Nicoletti’s latest poetry collection, Boombox Serenade, is a feast of metallic language, both beautiful and tough. With poems that span Italy and America, Connie Francis and The Cure, The A-Team and pro baseball, Nicoletti confronts the muscular contortions of being an American in today’s frightening culture. We walk “The Joey Nicoletti Bridge,” feeling the gravitational pull of the old country, of the immigrants in his past, “Because of them, I have the luxury/of taking these moments to lament,“ while chafing against cruel stereotypes in the media. Boombox Serenade is a celebration of these opposing emotions, a place where the poet can state: “But I am alive. . . even if it hurts at times.” Here is a poet who advises us to “look around … and in the mirror to see something beautiful.” Here is a poet who has honed his craft. Joey Nicoletti does indeed “please/our troubled, tired mouths.”

—Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella

Boombox Serenade is a playlist for middle age, Gen X edginess softening into domestic routines. But rather than lament that domesticity, the poems celebrate it, praising the comforts of marriage, family, pop culture, and food. Amid shouts-out to R.E.M. and The Cure, baseball and comic books, Nicoletti’s poems sharply observe and rejoice at small moments, from “auditioning” a raft of pies for Thanksgiving dinner, to bittersweet recollections of family members who’ve passed on. In the title poem, the speaker lists the songs to be played at his funeral and the friends to whom they’re dedicated; the resulting poem, and the collection as a whole, is a catalog of love and human connection, a “playlist of gratitude.”

—Juliana Gray, author of Honeymoon Palsy and Roleplay

Joey Nicoletti’s Boombox Serenade drew me in with its immensely likeable persona. This astute and wise collection, drawing upon the poet’s mundane experiences as much as his wild fantasies, made me furiously interested in getting to know him through his previous books and to anticipate where he goes next. Boombox Serenade is not a one-off effort, a random assortment of musings, but rather a recollection of one’s argumentatively lived life at midpoint, with all the anticipation attached to a consummate aesthete’s reconfiguration of the apparently quotidian into a magical ride upon joy and ecstasy. The likeability is a rare treat in our age of overindulgence of personal foibles, and it comes from Nicoletti’s ability to distance himself (but not ironically or fatuously) from his private ups and downs and notice the connections to history and culture, without giving in to any of the currently popular fatalisms. The likeability also stems from the poet’s ability to control the emotional tone and charge of a particular narrative stride, so that we understand that he is not being tossed and turned by random sensations but, as he notes in “Poem Where I Become a Fan of The A-Team,” “how much fun can be had / when a plan comes together.” Often he’ll screw the tone dangerously close to sentimentalism, very intentionally so, but save himself (and us the readers) through mature humor, as in “Noise Rock.” Placing himself in a wide field taking in both popular and high culture, we observe him trying to make sense of the impressions fed to him by the guardians, as he allows himself to be affected by these impulses and decides how to shape his authentic self in response: another key aspect of his likeability, because he lets us in on his moderating thought processes without fear of judgment. If social media, and often literary self-presentation, has become all about managing an image to satisfy one’s real and imagined sponsors, Nicoletti comes across in Boombox Serenade as having no predetermined image, but rather as a lovable “cannoli gangster, armed with plastic / forks, spoons, pens, pencils, and dry-erase markers.” I love that there is not a trace of didacticism or self-importance in this wide-ranging collection, though the risk is ever-present, and that Nicoletti realizes the incomplete, flexible, shape-shifting nature of his mental evolution: “I am a mouthpiece, still taking shape / I am a saucepan filled with boiling water,” as he says in “Encouragement.”

—Anis Shivani, author of Logography: A Poetry Omnibus

Joey Nicoletti is the author of four poetry chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections. His poems, nonfiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Ovunque Siamo, Paterson Literary Review, Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince; Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books; and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. A graduate of the University of Iowa, New Mexico State University, and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program, Nicoletti teaches creative writing at SUNY Buffalo State.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 108 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-347-8

$16

Boombox Serenade by Joey Ni… by BlazeVOX [books]