Okay, here's some free stuff for you--enjoy:

“Small Man on the Skeleton Crew Down at Olympia Stadium”

“Lionfish”

"In This Poem I Will Tell You About the Luncheon Following the Final Day of Class at the 2004 Meadow Brook Writers Program"

“Reading Between the Wire”

“Panties”

“Green Cologne”

“Routes”

“Those Days”

“Morning”

“The Age Demands”

“Welcome”

“Angel”

“Wedding Day”

“Lea Nicole”

Praise for:

“John Jeffire's tight, unflinching poems pack a real wallop. He knows these people, and he knows these streets. He can be tough, and he can be tender--and funny too. There's nothing unearned in these deeply felt, authentic poems. Like the people in his poems, he works hard, and he plays hard, and it all pays off in this moving, memorable collection.”
                                                         —Jim Daniels, author of Places/Everyone

“Reading Jeffire’s poetry is like reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence channeled through Philip Levine, Iggy Pop, and the MC5.  The terrain he covers is not 18^th century England but 1960’s Detroit , and while the voice is raw, it is ultimately true."
                                                         —Gary Goshgarian, author of Atlantis Fire

“John Jeffire's poems are perfectly urban:  gritty and beautiful, tragic and comic, tough and tender, profane and sacred.  He finds the lyricism of the polluted River Rouge, of the piss smell behind the dumpsters, of the child home from rehab, of the lionfish.  He knows that ‘we learned our commandments/ by breaking them’ and he offers us, through these poems our penance, our forgiveness, our Detroit psalms.”
                                                             —Gerry LaFemina, author of Zarathustra in Love

“Jeffire’s work is a run down  memory alley.  Tough, elegiac, authentic, emotional, these poems articulate getting a grip in the urban sprawl of Detroit .  Ouch!  Here is a disciplined mind and heart facing the facts and taking them to the mat."
                                                             —Albert Glover, author of RELAX YR FACE

"John Jeffire is one of Detroit 's finest working class fiction writers with his excellent novel Motown Burning.  In this new collection of poems he burns the earth down to the ground with his raw, gritty images that take his readers deep into the sublime regions of urban understanding and blue collar reality.  Travel with Jeffire through his street level poems of pool halls, whisky nights at the K of C, hunger and talking old soldiers.  John Jeffire is the real deal.  You will be moved to a new awareness about the world we all live, work and die in, and you'll be a stronger person for having traveled these paths through his poetry."
                                                             —M.L. Liebler, author of Breaking the Voodoo: Poetry and Fiction

“The poems of John Jeffire are first magical and then harsh. They are never sentimental. The poet re-creates a boyhood in the streets and alleys of an earlier Dearborn , but the poet is not a tour guide. There is pain here and sorrow, but there is never self-pity. These are manly poems that took my breath away.”
                                                                            —Rhoda Stamell, author of Detroit Stories

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Cover Design:  Lea Jeffire