Levon Helm

by Jason Morris

Levon Helm is Jason Morris’ first full-length collection, a picaresque situated in the drum and voice of mind. Like the drummer-singer with whom it shares a name, its influences are broad but firmly American. Along with bits torn from the edges of Moby-Dick and The Maltese Falcon, it mines the margins of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. As it takes stock of the immediacy and scale of places in the American West like Pinnacles and the Puget Sound, its psychic roots dig a haunted, old New England. These lyric poems are takes on human memory in geological time, as interested in their own asides and parentheticals as they are in the elements.

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What’s in a name? Music, insight, courage, and a fame matched by death and history and the instantaneous. Levon Helm the individual, the musician, the icon, positively notorious and storied, is as mysteriously absent from Jason Morris’s first full-length as he might be considerably present. There is difficulty in knowing the truth, and perhaps as a ghost or an analogy we might find the figure’s energies throbbing and glissading through and across the pages by default, by knowing or unknowing, by potential. Either way, or both ways, Morris’s voice is what fills this book first and foremost and it’s his voice that resonates with a severe beauty of scurry and scrawl from cover to cover."

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[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars