Reviewed by R. Bremner
Stranger on the Shore
Poems Inspired by Jazz
by Patricia Carragon
Human Error Publishing
January 2026, 84 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1948521246
Stranger on the Shore, Patricia Carragon’s latest poetry collection, takes us on a cab ride through the jazz heart and soul of city streets, smokey clubs, lonely apartments, and more, leaving us with a fuller appreciation of the music that pervades our lives.
Each poem in the collection is titled with a jazz song.
These jazz-inspired poems elate, depress, make you wonder why, doubt, and even have faith. Carragon draws upon the spirits of Fitzgerald, Ellington, Coltrane, Sinatra, and many more to inhabit and guide her poetry, but the pervasive moodiness of Nina Simone is present throughout.
Simone’s song “Feeling Good” is visited with a startling beginning that seems to belie the title:
Your sequestered hell
lives in the subconscious
confines you
inside flesh and bone.
You feel uncomfortable
can’t handle
the stranger from within.
But by the poem’s conclusion, a semblance of feeling good is restored, with a new day and changing season.
You’re feeling good again—
a gentle breeze
taps your face
Life has nine lives—
enjoy your freedom
while it lasts
The daily struggles with everyday life – whether physical or emotional – are a recurring theme in this collection. Again, Carragon turns to Nina Simone to flesh out life’s conflicts in two poems.
In “Tomorrow is My Turn (a pantoum)”:
Your problems become roommates—
broken pipe dreams amid a rusted future
And in “My Baby Don’t Care for Me”, which begins:
Smell rich to get ahead—
wear fancy clothes and makeup
hide desperation’s stench.
But concludes:
Wake up—
perfumed lies can’t change
who you are!
The everyday blues of everyday people are music throughout the book. The people we meet feel like our friends, our neighbors, our lovers, perhaps even ourselves. The lines of the poems are short and curt, but like Jersey Joe Walcott fighting Ezzard Charles, they pack a wallop. A few choice examples:
wishes upon a dying star.
Skyscrapers see but can’t reach out.
In a smoke-filled room,
she forgets about her life,
takes five
Being oversexed
has its problems.
Too many pints
covered up his flaws,
and the morning after
gave her a headache.
Each poem is titled after a jazz standard but launches from there into a deeper introspection into the lives of the folks who inhabit them. My personal favorite among so many excellent poems in this book (perhaps because of my own experiences as a cab driver in my twenties) is “So What”, inspired by the Miles Davis piece. The author follows a cab driver on his day’s run, The city’s quixotic pace.
Along his route he sees
The neon extravaganza
of Times Square—
a onetime haven
for junkies and pimps,
now infested with tourists
seeking cut-rate shows
and over-priced restaurants.
But
…So what.
As long as he got his fare,
he couldn’t care less
(how often I felt the same!)
After work, he would play trumpet in a local spot, then
have a few beers
with other vagabonds,
talk trash and politics
at Washington Square Diner,
get laid at her place,
or smoke a joint.
And on to his apartment, cluttered with vintage LPs, wall-to-wall books, “six-legged squatters”, and his cat, in a changing Greenwich Village, with investors and young urban professionals displacing longtime neighbors, friends dying of cancer, and his own advancing age, but too poor to retire, but:
Like the CD track,
he’d think, So what,
As long as he got his fare
and Social Security,
he couldn’t care less.
But the reader, the author, and the cab driver himself obviously do care. Empathy seethes in the pages and envelopes the reader.
I cannot conclude this review without a nod to its inclusion of an homage to Billie Holiday’s earth-shaking, consciousness-raising “Strange Fruit”, with the poem ending
Trees bear strange fruit—
never-ending harvests
rot across the land.
The grittiness of New York City, with its painful solitude but also its joyful exuberance, rules this collection. From a shabby walkup in Harlem to a swinging nightclub in Greenwich Village, for cab drivers, musicians and for all of us, jazz rules over this domain, and it thrives in Carragon’s poetry.
About the reviewer: A four-time honoree in the Allen Ginsberg Awards, R. Bremner has written of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1970s, in ten books/chapbooks, including his latest, You who are the stranger: collected poems 1979-1989, available at Bookshop . org, Barnes and Noble Online, and Amazon. Journals/anthologies include International Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry.