Now available from Crisis Chronicles Press and Amazon.com.
This “two-sided” chapbook is specially printed to approximate the experience of listening to a record. The reader reads to the end of Side One, then flips the chapbook to read Side Two.
Praise for The Everyday Parade/Alone With Turntable, Old Records:
“With a wisdom beyond his years, Justin Hamm presents tributes, laments, and elegies for the everyday and the working class, influenced by the best tradition of American folk and country music. The ghosts of Elvis, Hank, Townes, and Dylan ride shotgun — “the mangiest and most / loyal-looking mutts ever” — as Hamm exposes the “underbellies of the last minstrels” and shines a perfectly wrecked light on “the one period / in all of this long lie called history / without room for heroism or holiness.” And yet, that is exactly what these poems sing of, the heroic and the holy, and the choruses echoes on long after the last poem-track gives way to silence.”
~ ~ Sandy Longhorn, author of Blood Almanac
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“Put this poetry album on your turntable and listen as Justin Hamm spins you back into the origins of American song and the center of communal life. Share the voices he recovers and praise him for having the wisdom to savor ‘the loveliness / of [his] wife’s hair tucked behind her ears / and the almost imperceptible music of [his] little daughter’s sneakers / swishing through the…backyard grass.’ He knows what to sing!”
~ ~ Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate
justin hamm 