Tag Archives: Hoboken

Edward Abbey, Hoboken Author

In the mid-1980s, while living in Hoboken, I worked for several years at Viking Penguin on West 23rd Street as an editorial assistant, a glorified secretarial position for those of us with literary aspirations who were willing to accept the … Continue reading

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Revisiting “On the Waterfront” in Hoboken, by Al Desetta

(I lived in Hoboken for a decade in the 1980s. Al Desetta lived there twice as long in the 1980s and 1990s. Surely, we passed on the sidewalks, but we didn’t meet until we’d both settled in Woodstock years later. … Continue reading

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Jack Wiler: Hoboken Poet & Exterminator

In the 1980s on Washington Street, Hoboken’s main boulevard, the exterminator’s shop had a stained glass portrait of a cockroach hung in the window, a beautiful artwork done in honey browns. That was Hoboken at the time, both gritty and … Continue reading

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The Hoboken School of Poetry

Here’s a classic tale from the dawn of Hoboken’s gentrification. In the early 1970s, Sada Fretz, a book critic at Kirkus Reviews, had tired of commuting on “the weary Erie railroad with its un-air-conditioned cars and unexplained long stops,” as … Continue reading

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Nothing Triggers Memories like Music: A Hoboken Poem

Peter Aaron writes such solid music profiles for Chronogram. His account of Tommy Stinson, who began playing bass for the Replacements before he finished junior high school, sent me back to Hoboken in the 1980s, when their albums owned my … Continue reading

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“The Slow Walker” Has Time to See Nature

The truth is that few hikes offer what you could honestly call an adventure. The dangers and challenges that you overcome as you clamber up rocks or snowshoe down hillsides are ones that you and countless others have handled many … Continue reading

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Love in the City of Grudges, Reviewed by Bruce Weber

(Here’s Bruce Weber’s review from the Winter 2011/2012 issue of Home Planet News. Thanks, Bruce!) Will Nixon’s second book of poetry, Love in the City of Grudges, returns to the fertile, dysfunctional family territory of his first collection My Late … Continue reading

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Who Was My Mother?

(December 13th is my birthday. Really, it should be my mother’s day. Here’s the woman who became “My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse.”) Born Anne Fletcher in 1926 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Nancy Nixon by the time I arrived, … Continue reading

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In Praise of “The View From Jackass Hill” by George Drew

Once upon a time poems told stories about people. Think of Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” about a wandering old farmhand “worn out” and “asleep beside the stove” while a farm wife and her reluctant husband debate … Continue reading

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“Read Local”: My Holiday Appeal

Among the nicest gifts I received this year were two heartfelt appraisals of my poetry books by Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews. Many critics love to show off their smarts, but not so many share their real feelings as … Continue reading

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