In his tour de force The Jukebox Was the Jury of Their Love, Rodney Torreson drives his “Corvair around town,/ trying to ride the potholes to glory.” This master of emotional balance has created, with the grace and intensity of a Clarence Clemons solo, an authentic and until now unrevealed American history — yours. Put away your long-saved Rolling Stone mags, your Lester Banks insights, your scholarly insistences that miss the mark. Rod hits it. Hits it? He gets it. And he lives it with a voice sung with the passionate ache and innocence of Janis, Brian, Kenny, Lulu, John, Paul, Tom, Van, Lucinda, Leonard, Mick, and Joni. Of Lucinda Williams he sings, “You could fill your voice to the brim/ or turn it over to adjust splendor/ or shape the rain, so it would come loping/ across our hearts, or make a lake squirm/ in your loneliness, suddenly mine, . . .” In a torrid of eccentrically uncommon knowledge Torreson astonishingly riffs together song lyrics, languishing offstage lives, the tempestuous and the timeless, the dissipation of appreciation, untimely deaths, the erosion of music authentically created into another American commodity, and the ubiquitous longing for what will never be. Torreson writes, “I’m there in raw applause.” Throughout poem after poem, you will be too.
–Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, Losing Season, and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch
Reading the vivid poems in Rodney Torreson‘s The Jukebox Was the Jury of Their Love is like visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They not only reanimate the legendary performers—from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Janis Joplin and Johnny Rivers—they bring back the places, the people, and the emotions intertwined with music that has defined an entire generation. Like the Beatles on their first American tour, this fine collection sings and will “find favor” near and far.
–Matthew Brennan, author of One Life and The House with the Mansard Roof and The Music of Exile
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