Dec 05
“Legend has it that it took Jimi Hendrix 32 takes to master his “Night Bird Flying” and that was before multiple overdubs were added. The tune was first presented at the opening party of Jimi’s Electric Lady studio on August 26, 1970.Danny Shot nailed his version in one.”
—Ryan Mathews, author
Dec 02
“Danny Shot’s Night Bird Flying from Roadside Press is a fierce and poignant collection that captures the grit and tenderness of life on the fringes—where New Jersey meets New York and scars of the past meet the possibility of healing. Shot’s voice is steeped in the dualities of identity, blending humor with heartache and toughness with vulnerability.”—Richard Modiano
READ THE FULL REVIEW at Sensitive Skin Magazine here: https://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/night-bird-flying-by-danny-shot-review/
Dec 02
Shot of Life: A Review of Danny Shot’s Night Bird Flying
By Westley Heine
first published at the Rusty Truck
Like its namesake the Hendrix song “Night Bird Flying,” this collection of stories builds and builds until you think it’s hit a plateau. Then it builds upon itself again. Largely autobiographical, this book is written in a tough New Jersey, New York, some new voice that is also very familiar. It’s good storytelling to allow the characters to unravel and reveal themselves. By the end of the second piece “72 Scars” I was completely engrossed, wanting to learn more, and my sympathies were completely with the narrator.
Danny Shot leaves a lot of blood on the page. He paints a vivid picture of growing up in Jersey in the late 60s early 70s from greaser gang fights in the park, rivals, crushes, his Bukowski level acne, sex and drugs, studying boxing, from a friend dying too young to his father dying when Danny was only 15. There’s also some privileged gossip like treating his acne with the same famous doctor who did the hair transplants for famous clients like hockey player Bobby Hull, Frank Sinatra, and then U.S. Senator Joe Biden.
During the early flashbacks he viscerally conjures the insecure thoughts and phrases of a teenager. Most people leave that young person inside them behind until they atrophy. A good writer stays in touch however torturous that can be to the psyche. His teenage angst reminded me of my own. He accurately captures tripping on acid in a high school classroom in only half a page. That’s good writing.
On to the excitement of college, becoming a poet, underground music, finding and losing love. We get to tag-a-long through the Lower East Side and day-drinking with Gregory Corso in San Francisco. However, these memories are not macho retelling of glory days. What makes the book so compelling is the humility. The author doesn’t glaze over when he’d acted badly. There’s a reflectiveness and honesty in this book rare in a world that is increasingly virtue signaling and sterilizing itself out of life.
Cutting between the time of writing (presumably now) and decades past at first feels like the fourth wall fell down, but the effect is another level of honesty and shows how much the author has changed as a person. He is a survivor. He has made the transition from student to teacher. He describes the alchemy of conjuring the past. There are things he doesn’t want to write about but does anyway. So no, the memoir sections are not self-indulgent but very generous. The freedom of the 70s and 80s artist scene implodes under its own weight. The passion first warms, but then burns all those involved like a lighter under a bubbling spoon. This is personified in his tumultuous relationship with Carla, which I won’t attempt to summarize here because it’s his story to tell, and he does so very well.
Night Bird Flying also includes pieces like “Big Dick,” which as it turns out is a work of fiction. As males, who among us hasn’t fantasized about an increase in our manhood? The story takes this dream come true to Kafkaesque proportions until the fantasy becomes a nightmare. This is the kind of satire that perfectly comments on masculinity, and all the complexities and ironies one has to face when being both a poet and barroom brawler. From memoir to creative writing all these separate pieces complement each other until we have the essence of a man’s life, his youth, and the world of Beat Poetry he’s been a part of since the 70s. The writing is so full of life that I was near the end until I realized that Night Bird Flying is largely a meditation on death. Death of a lover, death of friends and fellow poets Allen Ginsberg and Andy Clausen, as well as the death of the mother he loves.
What I like most about Danny Shot’s writing is that it hits the sweet spot where things can be both funny and sad at the same time. Life is just fucked-up, but good storytelling keeps us from feeling that way.
Night Bird Flying is available for pre-order at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/night/184
Westley Heine is the author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician and Squatter through Roadside Press (2022), a short story collection 12 Chicago Cabbies (2021), and volume of poetry The Trail of Quetzalcoatl (2016). He has featured twice at the Green Mill Poetry Slam in Uptown Chicago, and is the new host of the poetry open mic at The Gallery Cabaret in Bucktown every 4th Saturday. Most recently Roadside Press has released his new poetry collection entitled Street Corner Spirits, audio excerpts of which are now available on most streaming services under the same title.
He’s been a taxi dispatcher, a roadie, a deliveryman, a squatter, a street musician, a grocery clerk, a chambermaid, a novelist, a painter, a metal head, a Boy Scout, an insurance investigator, a jailbird, a farmhand, sold tickets to the symphony, sold plasma, been unemployed, and been a filmmaker. Life is always creating new characters inside him, but always a writer. He’s rambled from Wisconsin, to Chicago, Europe, Texas, Mexico, California, and everywhere in between. Let in the light. Let out the fire. Instagram: @westleyheine
Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician and Squatter by Westley Heine is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/busking/98
Street Corner Spirits by Westley Heine is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/spirits/136
Oct 10
Apocalypsing
By Jason Anderson
Genre: Science Fiction / Satire
Reviewed by Samantha Hui (Independent Book Review)
Jason Anderson’s Apocalypsing is a quick-witted, pop-culture savvy, sci-fi satire that is equal parts absurd and introspective. Reviewed by Samantha Hui.
Domestic foibles. Impending armageddon. Aliens in the transdimensional afterlife. Jason Anderson’s Apocalypsing is a quick-witted, pop-culture savvy, sci-fi satire that is equal parts absurd and introspective. Through his trials in the afterlife, a modern man learns what he was missing in his living life. Anderson’s writing toes the line of cynicism and misanthropy but ultimately turns toward a message of cautious hope and pragmatic optimism.
“‘Black market baby formula is a thing,’ Wesley offered in corroboration.‘They removed tariff-rate quotas from processed sugar, then the supply drowned on the vine. It’s 120 degrees in Omaha and Americans can’t get Mountain Dew anymore. People are going to start killing each other in the streets over kids’ birthday cakes. Watch.’”
David Downey died a nobody: his best friends were comic book characters; his mother passed her agoraphobia down to him; and his girlfriend Stacey left him because he had nothing to offer to her, himself, nor the rest of the world. As luck would have it, even in the afterlife, David belongs to neither heaven nor hell.
Unbeknownst to either party, Stacey is a soul succubus who has trapped David in a purgatory of existing as her shadow. What had begun as a mission to become unshackled from Stacey’s unknowing clutches quickly becomes an odyssey of self discovery and world saving against an Anti-God under the guise of a democratic congressional nominee named Tag Gottfried.
“‘I’m sorry, but just to recap—you’re telling me I belong to a soul-sucking Jinni genie who descends from a long line of witch-people that used sex to blow off magic steam. Do I have that more or less correct?’”
Apocalypsing is uproariously funny and teeming with pop-culture references: Bobby Kennedy is David’s heavenly guide in the afterlife; River Phoenix is romantic and a sweetheart; Gandhi didn’t end up where you think he did. The characters in this book are quick on their feet and have sharp tongues. Even the aliens have imported all knowledge of current pop-culture references into their knowledge base.
The referential dialogue makes for some hilarious character interactions while smartly calling attention to the absurdity of our current reality. The Anti-God, Tag, pressurizes the in-world MARS virus, anti-immigrant sentiments, and economic inequality to bring upon a New Testament level apocalypse. Apocalypsing is a “plague on both your houses,” delivering a scathing critique of the division currently plaguing our political climate.
“‘I would note that the First Revelation does not speak of ammunition. There is no more powerful weapon than the microphone. Each word is its own arrow. The supply line is infinite. My mouth will be like a Gatling gun of glorious mistruths.’”
David is a sympathetic protagonist that many readers are going to identify with. He begins the book as someone who lacks introspection and courage, though his witticism keeps readers on his side. In his life, he was a cynical debt collector who was just a cog in the machine. He upheld that his failure to Stacey was due to him trying to protect her from the shame he felt toward himself and his family. He jokes that he died due to abandonment. Only in his death does he stop fearing for himself and putting his (after)life in action.
“‘The world is your oyster. It always was, you were just too busy metaphorically dying when you were alive to do anything about it. I recommend you take this opportunity to invert that process. Go swimming with ghost sharks. Maybe let yourself get eaten. Try to enjoy all thirty-one flavors.’”
Apocalypsing is a story about taking action. The apocalypse will not simply be a tragedy to live through, but an active verb of what the people will do to save each other’s souls in the end times. This book is hilarious, current, and—at times—tender. An excellent choice for fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Good Omens.
Purchase your copy of APOCALYPSING at Magical Jeep Distributing (official distributor of Roadside Press), at Barnes & Noble, other online book retailers or request it at your favorite, local bookstore.
Aug 04
A pop culture Book of the Dead, Apocalypsing begins with David, a freshly deceased ghost, who is more self-conscious about his looks rather than upset about being dead. If he knew he was going to die he would have worked out more and dressed up first. This nonchalant humor sets the tone for a journey that playfully suggests that death may not be relief from life, but at least there is comic relief. Bobby Kennedy appears to David to give orientation, a Virgil to David’s Dante.
A clever plot mixes contemporary physics with theology to create a fresh vision of the beyond weaving through the battle of good and evil, some political satire, the perils of dating in the afterlife, David witnessing his own funeral, being beholden to his ex even as a ghost, that reuniting with long lost relatives is as awkward as it was on Earth, friendly aliens, eventually culminating in a show-down for all existence.
The dialogue in Apocalypsing is popcorned with mass media references which some readers may need Wikipedia at hand in order to navigate this Bardo. However, pop culture junkies will rejoice in the light approach to serious subjects like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the Information Age. Hilariously there’s an Anti-Hell where an evil doer may be surrounded by happy people in perpetuity. Perhaps like a Pharaoh armed with his Earthly possessions in his tomb before entering the next realm, there’s a subtle warning that what we fill our brains with in this world will play on repeat in eternity. You might as well dwell on all the things you love. Ultimately, Apocalypsing is a love story.
—Westley Heine, author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician & Squatter
APOCALYPSING is available for pre-order at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/apocalypsing/177
Jul 20
Demi-glace Gods
Nothing worse than being sauced
for other sauces,
demi-glace gods spooning out
all the simmering half-baked worship
at discount prices
and they say a dog and its human
grow to look more like each other
as the years go on,
the same is true of writers
and their writing
which does not bode well for me
or damn near anyone else
in this fluttering rapid eye
butterfly net world;
the food channel always there
when you are hungry,
fleecing tigers turned into rugs
like a highly unusual black shoeshine
way of roaring.
The Workers Will Reach An Agreement with Their Oppressors Next Week
I am not some over courteous tailcoat doorman
waiting on tips that never come through –
I have read the papers as well,
seems all is well in this land of many discontents,
the workers will reach an agreement
with their oppressors next week,
so the rest of us can get to work, find that
able punch clock always waiting
to dock you a full half hour for a two minute indiscretion;
no wonder there are clocks everywhere to remind
you that your time was never yours
to begin with, even there at your birth:
the beginning, recorded right there on the certificate;
what a cruel complete prison to build around
those first pink wailing screams that seem
to spill right out of your splayed, exhausted
mystery juice mother while the many nurses working
a double sop up blood and offer an expectant
congratulations that comes for that missed smoke break
continuance of one thing after another.
Hopscotch Girls in the Rain
The handicapped bus pulls up to the curb,
lets a seriously stooped elderly gentleman with double-cane out –
someone must still care.
And I try not to blow it,
the candles have endured enough cake already.
Watching those hopscotch girls in the rain.
A baker’s dozen all in light summer dresses.
Lined up like ladies in waiting.
Making their way through a nimble labyrinth
of chalked numbers.
Barefoot chatterboxing.
A lucid moment I know they will never
get back again.
Quite impressive actually.
The others lost to song and clapping.
A light rain to be sure, but still a faltering sky
beyond notice.
Those successive brown pigtails
running the gamut.
These Many Cold Winters of the Heart is dancing splinters of Life, and that inevitable experience of Death that our common humanity demands we all share. A book of blue-collar poetry, with a surrealist bent, this work is also a reminder of the importance of that great swelling laughter that must always persist under the hard advancing glare of these many unforgiving days.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Evergreen Review, Red Fez, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Blue Collar Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.
These Many Cold Winters of the Heart is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/winters/172
Jul 04
first published in http://misfitmagazine.net/
Scot Young, They Said I Wasn’t College Material, Roadside Press, Magic Jeep Distributing, available on Amazon, 2024, 132 pages, $15
Young’s latest collection is a selected, mostly culled from before 2009. The title comes from an actual conversation with a guidance counselor who failed to see Young’s potential as a student. Scot, in addition to being the editor of the longstanding online poetry site Rusty Truck, has been an educator sensitive to the needs of students who often fall between the cracks as he almost did. His poems reflect a downhome in the Ozark’s personality who boozes, chases girls, is subject to all the foolishness of being young and feckless but who embraces a relationship that becomes a life partnership and mature adult. These poems are narratives told in everyday language of life lived without pretention, often with humor and insight for those of us who like our poetry without garnishes, and a musical accompaniment you might find on your local bar’s jukebox.
THEY SAID I WASN’T COLLEGE MATERIAL by Scot Young is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/college/154
Jun 28
![The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton [hardcover book]](https://roadsidefam.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/435691018_2269411643399833_4817135716184713194_n-263x300.jpg)
Just got my signed hardcover copy of Dan Denton’s amazing memoir, The Dead and the Desperate, on Roadside Press. If you’re looking for a tale of personal purgatory but ultimate redemption, this is the book for you. There have been many literary takes on blue collar life in America—dead-end jobs, dead-end relationships, and often mixed with substance abuse or variations of mental illness. But as a deft and brutally honest storyteller, Dan Denton manages to make such well-trodden paths not only compelling, but literally a page-turner. You can’t wait to see what crazy shit will come down next.
And there is an overarching theme in the book of the soul-crushing toll that factory/blue collar life takes upon those trapped in grinding work hours, and living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet amidst challenges and experiences that might have ended a lesser person, Denton manages a wry sense of dark comedy, mixed with an almost educational take on an American working class that has been ground down by our current corporatocracy.
Assorted short chapters of the book focus specifically on truly illuminating topics like the economics/psychology of sex work, the history of the factory as an institution, economic disparity, the rise of inner-city crack and associated incarcerations, mood disorders/SSRI’s/Big Pharma, the disintegration of “the American Dream,” and the social fallout of globalization.
But it is the all-too-human ordeals that drive the story—a descent into the depths, the road back, and then a “return with the elixir” (in the form of this book). Denton has come away with a hell of a life-tale, is now many-years clean and sober, and living the life of a full-time writer.
Not everyone has a compelling story to tell. And not everyone with a compelling story quite knows how to tell it. Neither of those things are the case with Dan Denton.
Read it and see!
Jun 25
first published in misfitmagazine.net
Susan Ward Mickelberry, and blackberries grew wild, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep, available on Amazon, 2024, 100 pages, $15
Susan is essentially a narrative poet reflecting on her past in the many places she has lived in and visited as an army brat, over a long and eventful life. A strong sense of loss attends many of these, especially that of her beloved husband and family members now long gone. There are exotic locations, scents, and sounds, and more staid, though still lush, at home poems in Florida. As life is a journey, Susan has a rich one to share touching upon locations and experiences many of us can only visit by watching travelogues or hitching a rich Rick Steve as he journeys from one exotic location to another. He may wax lyrical but he is no poet as Mickleberry most definitely is.
And Blackberries Grew Wild by Susan Ward Mickelberry is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/blackberries/155
Jun 24
first published in misfitmagazine.net
James Duncan, Cistern Latitudes, Roadside Press, Distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2024, 84 pages, $15
Duncan’s narratives often put me in mind of late 50s, early 60s cafés featuring traditional folk singers. These were usually solo acts playing acoustic guitar with artists singing traditional ballads and the occasional original song. Not that Duncan is a balladeer, per se, but his subjects often feature a rambling man, crossing the country, usually alone missing someone, or searching for someone new as most of those songs did. He is often lonely, close to despair but not a defeatist; there is always another day, another ramble, new places to go and see and hopefully, a new love to find.
