$19.99
“A touching chronicle of things loved and things lost. These are poems filled with sharply observed detail, and suffused with humane wisdom and quiet melancholy.”
–Charles Coe – author of All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents.
Scratching Lottery Tickets on a Street Corner shows what can happen when a former journalist like Jon Bishop takes up the poet’s pen. Bishop’s first book of poems highlights the excitement possible when the skill of precise observation combines with a remarkable command of language. Time after time Bishop captures and preserves the otherwise fleeting moment—the changing light of day, the angst of solitude-becoming-loneliness—all rendered in tableaux that are as affecting as they are memorable.
–Rod Kessler, author of Off in Zimbabwe and professor emeritus at Salem State University.
This is down-to-earth poetry, written with keen observation of life and its complexities, wry humor, and honest self-awareness. A good read.
–Ann Taylor, author of The River Within.
Scratching Lottery Tickets on a Street Corner
by Jon Bishop
$19.99, Full-length, paper
978-1-63534-701-2
2018
Jon Bishop’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Sentinel & Enterprise, the Arts Fuse, and Boston Literary Magazine. He holds a Master’s degree in English literature and lives in Massachusetts. This is his first book.
Shaghn Gose Wordell III –
The growing dark of dusk recurs time after time in the verse and prose in Jon Bishop’s collection, setting a powerful, lasting, arresting tone. Even as he describes early morning, late in the night, or an indifferently bright daytime on a town street, there’s no mistaking the immediately relatable, yet so well spoken, feelings of regret or continual looking back on a past that will not return.
If it is a bleak world Mr. Bishop writes on, it is one readers know well. His craft is well rooted in an often gruff northeast whose bitter cold shapes dreams of escape to more sun-kissed states, dreams that die when the lottery ticket turns up nothing. He knows the distinct pains of love never spoken, and of never “burying the dead” after a passing.
Career disappointment, falling far short of dreams, is another big theme here, and I can keenly feel the mature angst and lasting unsettlement the speaker conveys, making do with a kind of life he hated and wanted not to live. And yet here Mr. Bishop provides, or rather suggests a happier resolution. In being told, for long years of our lives, to reach for the stars, and be something great, our desires are in a way set up to be let down. But taking a look at where we do end up, whether by mistake or just autopilot—real life has its charms and its interests, too. Even with more sober expectations, yes, it’s worth that second round of drinks at day’s end.