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Jim Coppoc

Blood, Sex, & Prayer, 2005

Poems by Jim Coppoc
64 pp., 5 1/2" x 8 1/2",
Perfect bound paperback
ISBN: 1-933126-22-1

This is a work of Fusion Poetry.
It is meant, as all good poetry is meant,
to be read out loud.

Author Profile

• Click here to expand profile

  • Jim Coppoc is an award-winning poet and teacher; a lecturer at Iowa State University, where he teaches composition and creative writing; and the Special Projects Coordinator at Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities. In addition to his many creative and scholarly efforts, Coppoc has spent most of his life exploring the various media of performance art, having worked as musician, actor, stand-up comic, network radio D.J., and performance poet. Marc Smith, the founder of Slam Poetry, has called him “one of the new breed giving poetry new breath.”
    
    Coppoc is the author of two chapbooks of poetry and two plays, editor of the forthcoming Tens: an Anthology of SlamFusion Poetry in the Midwest, and runner-up for the 2004 Frieda Stein Fenster Award for Millennial Poetry. His creative work has appeared in dozens of literary journals, including Del Sol Review, Tryst, Barbaric Yawp and San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, and his scholarly work on performative ethos, the history of performance poetry, and performance as pedagogy is published and presented all over the world, including excerpts in the forthcoming Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry. This is Coppoc’s first full-length book of poetry.
     

Review Comments:

Jim Coppoc's Blood, Sex, & Prayer speaks up, cries out, laughs and rages,
ponders and judges, and insists on a capital R romantic vision of how a life is
to be adequately, insistently lived. I finished this book imagining what angry,
holy, and joyful things he might be saying to us in the years and books to come.
    – Deborah Keenan, American Book Award winner, author of Good Heart (2003)

Jim Coppoc writes poems about important stuff. Some of it's theological, some of it's political, some of it's personal; all of it is important.
“Free verse” describes a creative process in which each poem seeks its own perfect form. I don't think I've ever read a poet truer to that definition than Jim Coppoc. He is absolutely protean in the way he lets each poem shape itself. There is a marvelous honesty and openness in his work.
This book has treasures in it, yet I come away with a sense that all I have seen is the tip of the Jim Coppoc iceberg. All you Titanics out there, think about a lifeboat drill.
    – Jack McCarthy, Stand-Up Poet, author of Grace Notes

The poems in Blood, Sex, & Prayer insist on being heard as well as read, because Jim Coppoc is working in the dynamic zone where performance poetry and the written word intersect. What he produces is an invigorating hybrid – poems that play well in a crowded room but also earn their ink and paper. The range of Coppoc's voice (as suggested by the title) is remarkable; he can rant and descant, confess and profess, and yet he always makes the language resonate. Listen!
    – Neal Bowers, author of eight books, including Out of the South (2002) winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award.

Jim Coppoc is lectern pushed over, expectations rattled, and convention pushed aside. And Blood, Sex, & Prayer establishes him as a master of cynical lyricism and a wordsmith whose work is further proof that poetry never retreated to that dusty bookshelf it once called home--snarling and coiled, it was behind us all the time, just waiting to pounce.
    – Patricia Smith, award-winning poet, playwright, journalist and performer, and author of Life According to Motown.

Jim Coppoc's Blood, Sex, & Prayer follows the zealous path of the 21st Century Slam troubadour – wowing audiences from the stage and twisting their beliefs on the page. Coppoc is one of the new breed giving poetry new breath.
    – Marc Smith, Founder of Slam Poetry, author of Crowd Pleaser
 

Table of Contents

• Click here to see poem titles
   

  • Prayer 1

  • Unemployment 5

  • Ars Poetica 8

  • Evidence 9

  • 9/10 Mentality, a scene from a WTC eatery 10

  • Roadhouse Revelation 11

  • Sex, Poetry, and the Open Road 12

  • A Televised Address to the Nation 13

  • Woman Dancing 15

  • The Last Recessional 16

  • In the Mood: a Sonata 19

  • Photo Album 20

  • Malignant 21

  • Government Issue 23

  • I Would Make You My Poem 24

  • Before the Bullet 26

  • Variations on a Theme 28

  • I Think My Wife Hates Sinatra 29

  • Day is Gone 31

  • Light and Shadow 32

  • The Value of Contemplation 33

  • Fame 35

  • Cosmic Irony 36

  • Light Under Pressure 38

  • Blood on the Windshield 39

  • Next to you (my heart) 40

  • Blind 41

  • Where Were You? 42

  • Tonight 43

  • Still 44

  • The Wages of Cloister 45

  • 52 46

  • Revolution 49

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Last modified: 09/30/07