The Jersey Slide

Danny Shot’s beautifully vulnerable poetry is a splendid, multi-barreled blues song DuBois called double consciousness. As Shot says we live in “the land of God and Google,” a place where this poet, American and Jewish, in New York and in Jersey, on the page and off the wall, splits his chest in half again and again. There we see him, family members and friends and memories come and gone, his words the autobiography of a man who is not only one of our finest poets, but also a living, breathing record of Punk and Plath, of loss and love.


 

-- Kevin Powell, GRAMMY-nominated poet; author of 16 books

Danny Shot’s poems are both epic and exquisitely personal – there are echoes of Whitman in the vast scope of his work, in the music and the transcendence, in the breathtaking glory he finds in the deceptively diurnal; of O’Hara, in his self-effacement and intimate humor; of Yeats in the breadth of his unique language which embraces the spiritual nature of his earthly environment. But his poetry is most assuredly his own, with deft twists of wit quickly swirling into stunning, profound truths. The Palisades, the Mets, Hoboken’s late beloved Maxwell’s – all are celestial in Danny Shot’s world, and he continually surprises with epiphanic lines that pierce the heart, and swiftly, miraculously, we see ourselves.
 

-- Tammy Faye Starlite, author of Chant