Elvis Night at Johnny's, a poetry chapbook by Mike Schneider
Publication Date: March 1, 2022
Paperback, 40 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-03-5
$19.50 retail, $15.00 from publisher
The title poem of this new chapbook from Mike Schneider situates us inside “an expanding gas / bubble from some kind of cosmic / burp” in which “We exist, hieroglyphic bird / tracks, a parade of scratch marks / on sheets of pulped cellulose / & rag, that signify what?” His “scratch marks” here signify quite a lot, in fact, embracing an entire mad world that he circumnavigates at a breathless pace, with Elvis and Dalí and Hoagie Carmichael and Tom Mix and a host of others along for the ride, companions and guides and saviors. Schneider’s language crackles with jazzy improvisation, but his wit is in the service of serious themes, nowhere more so than in his tribute to his Vietnam vet brother, “fucked / by history or whatever you want to call / this shit-hole business, that not only happens / it happened to my brother.” So it’s personal, this brief, intense survey of the state of the world, but also universal. And at the close of the final poem, when he puts his cap back on his pen and “It makes a small click”, that click reverberates long after reading.
Praise for Mike Schneider & Elvis Night at Johnny’s
“The world / a gift to digest and pass on,” writes Mike Schneider in “Sail Away” the penultimate poem of his marvelous latest chapbook, Elvis Night at Johnny’s. It’s a sentence that encapsulates the project of this book—to embrace the stuff of the world and make it new for us. Rich with artistic and musical references, the collection is part blues lament, part jazz riff, part magic. In this brilliantly crafted sequence of poems, Schneider marries sonic power with vivid imagination to create a book that sings beautifully and powerfully about the passage of time such that one tastes the sweetness and bitterness of life at once in nearly every poem.
—Beth Gylys, author of Body Braille & other poetry collections, Professor, Georgia State University
It’s a pleasure to ride along as Mike Schneider’s poems leap and glide with propulsive energy and wonderful language. Individually and collectively they have scope that ranges from cosmology to delight in the sound of a word (“Aconcagua") to the ghosts of Middle-European history. They get around, from Pittsburgh to Lisbon to Kentucky to Nicaragua, with razzle-dazzle, sensory pleasure, heart and thoughtfulness.
—Arlene Weiner, playwright and poet, author of City Bird
This is a terrific collection of distinctive and sure-handed poems, with surprising and memorable twists of language and leaps among a wide range of locales and subject matter. Schneider’s images are made even sharper by the lovely accompaniment of sound: “Black squirrel / tails twitch into question marks / as acorn bombs rattle the grooved tin / roof.” — Bravo!
—Jeff Worley, author of many poetry volumes, Kentucky Poet Laureate (2019-2020)
About the Author
Mike Schneider has published poems in many literary journals and two previous poetry chapbooks. Three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he won the 2012 Editors Award in Poetry from The Florida Review and the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press. He began writing during the Vietnam War when, while serving at an air force base in Ohio, he published an anti-war “underground” newspaper. After three years practicing law, he studied literature and writing in graduate school. He has worked as a science writer, won awards for magazine writing, and written poetry reviews and essays on culture for several publications. With a colleague in 2010, he founded East End Poets, a group of Pittsburgh-based writers who meet to share their work. In 2017, for the Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie Mellon University, he taught the first course on Bob Dylan in Pittsburgh. He lives in that city’s historic South Side neighborhood.
Cover artwork, Joan Miró, Bethsabée, 1972
Color Etching and Aquatint
Used by permission of the Miró Estate
© Successió Miró / ADAGP, Paris, 2022