Poetry | $16 ($14 direct from UDP)
Perfect-bound. 248 pp, 6 x 8 in.
ISBN 978-1-933254-15-9
Distribution: SPD

Winner of the 2007 PEN Oakland National Book Award

The Final Nite & Other Poems, Complete Notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006 chronicles, in verse, nearly two decades of work written while listening to live performances by the musician Charles Gayle. Including every poem written under these circumstances, the poems reflect, respond to, or incorporate elements of Gayle's music as well as his "speeches" and "sermons." The Final Nite was also the winner of the 2007 PEN Oakland National Book Award.

"Steve Dalachinsky is a poet of the real world in a time when reality is despised, dismissed, not understood or lied about." —AMIRI BARAKA


"Dalachinsky writes free jazz. He lives the music, and his poems capture its heat and illumination." —FRANCIS DAVIS, music & cultural critic at the ATLANTIC MONTHLY 
and author of Bebop and Nothingness

"
Dalachinsky feels compelled not to capture and preserve these musical events, but rather to react to them and record his responses. He often follows the projected-verse/open-field writing technique of Charles Olson, which involves taking in everything in your field of vision, and experiencing stimuli through 'all six senses.' So a poem could result from any number of stimuli, from an art exhibit to a memory of a lost notebook:



i, padlocked & lost in my own

combination

like bone & broken lens

venture thru

the mem’ry of a thing & always find

blank spaces

hard choices

balled up attitudes

& always

disenchantment

Dalachinsky’s work also brings to mind the immediacy of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. 'Poetry becomes like staves of music, writing within the musical realm,' Dalachinsky said. He often writes in glyphs, symbols that don’t resemble any written speech, as he’s listening to the music—his own private score. On the pages of Final Nite, words are strewn sparsely across the page in a seemingly random fashion—like the trailing notes at the end of an improvised solo."
—CAROL WIERZBICKI, The Brooklyn Rail

"A poetic and moving documentation of an artist's art and its impact, written by one extraordinary man about another." —ALL ABOUT JAZZ

NEWS AND REVIEWS

03.31.08 | Galatea Resurrects reviews Steve Dalachinsky’s The Final Nite

02.18.07 | The Outsiders Writers’ Book Review reviews Steve Dalachinsky’s The Final Nite

11.12.06 | Review of Steve Dalachinsky’s The Final Nite in All About Jazz

11.01.06 | The Brooklyn Rail reviews Steve Dalachinsky’s The Final Nite

09.09.06 | Culture Catch reviews Steve Dalachinsky’s The Final Nite

Steve Dalachinsky is the author of In Glorious Black & White (UDP 2005) and contributed collages to The Race Poems (UDP 2004). He lives in New York City.