“Ellis’ poems dazzle in their pacing, in their extravagant use of sound, and in their willingness to confront received ideas of how a poem should be put together and what it should include and exclude.”
Crank Shaped Notes
by Thomas Sayers Ellis
This book of photos, poems, and essays chronicles like never before the inner world of GoGo, Washington D.C.’s official music. Thomas Sayers Ellis masterfully captures the rhythms, beats, and souls of a culture which is ever expanding beyond the beltway of our nation’s capital. Crank Shaped Notes is a must-have volume.
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc., He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry.
