Books
My books...
The second offering, the near thought, the addled mind, the ringing phone, wine stained poetry. Thrift Store Majestic: everything you thought you left behind, battered and bruised, and just like new.
Reader Comments on Thrift Store Majestic:
"Lovely snaking rhythms and tenderly-painted scenes."
"Like a hangover with all the paranoia and need for comfort."
"A little sad, a little delicate, a little sexy."
"I get the same feeling reading this as I do when I am listening to Jim Morrison reading from Portrait of an American Poet."
"Hauntingly sentimental and darkly touching."
Encapsulates the mirth, nostalgia, struggles, and pitfalls of looking backward too often, and looking forward just not enough.
TCM Book Review by Lynn Burton:
"While reading Jim Duncan’s first published book of poetry, I often got this image of a P.I. type with his feet crossed on top of a mahogany desk in a dark office. Think Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and you have it. It’s the dark-edged voice with a sense of humor in Mr. Duncan’s poetry that gave this image its home in my mind. The works in this collection combine a fear of aloneness with the joy of it as well. You can feel the emotions--the hope, sadness, wonder and questions...simple yet brilliant...a true talent on the rise.
Reader comments on Welcome to the night shift:
“Amusing in a close your eyes and take a sad drag of your cigarette kind of way.”
"If I were writing an review of Jim Duncan's new book in The New Yorker, I bet I would use the phrase
'technical brilliance' somewhere."
"Damn fine work."
Click on the pictures to buy the books!
Thrift Store Majestic
Welcome to the night shift
Ballast: stories, poems & photos by James H Duncan
What we leave behind, we carry with us forever. This collection has been called "brilliant" and "endearing...a certain winner" with poetry and short stories of "elusive depth" that "leaves the reader bone dry and begging for more." Other comments:
"Very philosophical...contemplating life's cycle of cause and effect."
"A thing of beauty."
"Absolutely stunning."
Maybe a Bird Will Sing
Lines and stanzas mingle through smoky backrooms, California sidewalks and New York jazz clubs in this fourth collection of heartaches, daydreams, and mediations.
From Kami, Australian poet and proprietor of Jazz From Hell Productions:
"Any poet who writes about his journeys across America or mentions a Greyhound bus is going to be instantly tagged as a Kerouac rip-off, but with James H Duncan, it’s not Jack’s shoulder he’s looking over, it’s Neil Cassady’s.
From the opening lines of “Adrift a sea of ordinary laughter” — even the bums there seemed jazz enlightened — you find yourself drawn into a world of fading dreams, tired souls, ambitious strippers, whiskey glasses, hustlers, juke boxes and travelers. With nods to Kerouac, Bukowski, Brautigan, Meltzer, crazed street prophets and those panhandling midgets that haunt yr dreams, Duncan has taken the Beat generation and dragged it handcuffed, kicking and guzzling cheap wine into the new millennium. A millennium where more and more a voice is going to be needed down there under the bridges, on the doss house floor, the back of the dusty buses, in the seedy strip joints and bars that stay open all night and day but never let the light in. James H Duncan isn’t that voice (yet), oh no he’s the quiet guy at the bar, nursing his last drink and taking it all in. Later on, when you’ve forgotten it all, he remembers.
He knows the names of the hookers you visited, he knows where you dropped your last twenty, he saw how you got those grazes on yr forehead, the bruises on yr knees, he was there at opening time for the heart starter and he was on the bus when you fled town. He knows about the heroic failure of working class America, the human spirit’s struggle to survive; he has dreamt the same dreams, slept with the same women, got thrown out of the same bars…the little victories and moments that keep you going, the moments when the coin drops and the song comes on, the first sip of that first cold brew, the girl smiling from the other end of the bar – he’s mapped it all.
His isn’t the voice of reason, it’s the voice of being, of surviving – and now he’s here with this collection of memories and words, recollections and street wise prophecy to help you do the same."
"Bird On A Wire" artwork by Alan Stones.
From J. Lester Allen, poet the publisher of Bird War Press: "[James] Duncan paints time and place with map-like precision, with words that lead the reader on an ongoing journey through a landscape of empty wine bottles and drunken dreams, always attempting to quell the midnight, to stave off the mundane in search of something more."
