Blue Chip Stamp Guitar

Blue Chip Stamp Guitar is a love story-about Sue and her guitar It starts with a cheap guitar the poet's mother bought with Blue Chip stamps and continues through her life, outlasting jobs, marriages, and deaths. A guitar is just a wooden box with six strings strung from one end to another, but in the musician's hands, it becomes music and magic, companion and comfort. These backstage poems describe the teenager dreaming of fame, the young adult dealing with sex and stage fright, and the seasoned performer lugging gear and singing through bad weather, hecklers, sore throats and sore fingers. At the beginning and the end, she plays alone, feeling the calluses on her fingertips as she sends music into the air. These poems will appeal to all music lovers, especially the musicians who share that special bond with their instruments.

"There is no pretention or affectation in this work, just solid storytelling, and poetic craft at its best. Here is a rich life, bittersweet, at times vulnerable yet underneath is a quality of humility with fierce independence in the life and the poetry."

--Dave Mehler, editor of Triggerfish Critical Review, author of Roadworthy

"This collection takes the reader into the 'raw, unpolished edges, dust, and glue,/the underbelly of a cathedral,' of a life lived in pursuit of music and love finally found in Fred, the husband/roadie to whom the book is dedicated. By the end of this intimate collection, you'll be singing, 'Let's play another memory.'"

--Lacie Semenovich, author of Community, Not Market, and Legacies