The Jersey Slide

Coming November 4th
Preorder now!

The Jersey Slide is a pugnacious, colloquial, irreverent, and unapologetically Jersey meditation on friendship, family, aging, and gentrification. Recounting tall tales and in-jokes, local histories and family sagas, the poems in this book sidle up to you like a loquacious drunk at your local dive, revealing unexpected drama, pathos, and humor in landscapes and faces you thought you knew. Veteran poet and proud Hoboken resident Danny Shot revels in the quotidian richness of his experience and celebrates the unvarnished, working-class beauty of a diverse and scrappy community that stares, day in and day out, at the Colossus of Manhattan's “glorious ass.” Welcome to the slide.

Danny Shot’s WORKS was published in 2018 by CavanKerry Press. Recent endeavors include being an associate editor of A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine (2020–2023) and poetry editor of Red Fez (2018–2021). You can hear him talk about his family on the recent podcast LBI Presents, “Ghosts of Your Family Past,” from the Leo Baeck Institute. He was featured on the PBS television show State of the Arts on the occasion of his book party for WORKS. Danny is a New Generation Beat Poet Laureate (2024–Lifetime). Danny Shot was the longtime publisher and editor of the arts and literary magazine Long Shot, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. More information can be found on his website: dannyshot.com

from The Golden Path

You explain that you’re cousins,
pointing to a photo of Florie.
His eyes light up.
He’s the curator.
He says she’s a really big deal around here,
which is why her display is next to Albert Einstein’s.
He takes your picture next to the photo.
You feel bad that you’re dressed bummy
in shorts and a tee shirt.
He says they’d been looking for living relatives
of Florence Mendheim for over a decade.
Here you are. Here we are.

*****

from Tempest

Some poets have tied their sails and souls
to the warm comforts of the academy
rare few have cast off against the prevailing gales
emerging as prophet for their motley crew of misfits
others became unmoored by the cruel vicissitudes of fashion
unable or unwilling to follow the wind
a few have fallen into the doldrums, pounding out despaired
manifestoes to the sound of Mahler on broke down radios in
half lit rooms.

Danny Shot’s beautifully vulnerable poetry is a splendid, multibarreled blues song DuBois called double consciousness. Through his poetry, Shot details a world where this poet, American and Jewish, in New York and in Jersey, on the page and off the wall, splits his chest in half again and again. There we see him, family members and friends and memories come and gone, his words the autobiography of a man who is not only one of our finest poets, but also a living, breathing record of punk and Plath, of loss and love.

—Kevin Powell, GRAMMY-nominated poet and author of 16 books

Danny Shot’s poems are both epic and exquisitely personal: there are echoes of Whitman in the vast scope of his work, in the music and the transcendence, in the breathtaking glory he finds in the deceptively diurnal; of O’Hara, in his self-effacement and intimate humor; of Yeats in the breadth of his unique language that embraces the spiritual nature of his earthly environment. But his poetry is most assuredly his own, with deft twists of wit quickly swirling into stunning, profound truths. The Palisades, the Mets, Hoboken’s late beloved Maxwell’s—all are celestial in Danny Shot’s world, and he continually surprises with epiphanic lines that pierce the heart, and swiftly, miraculously, we see ourselves.

—Tammy Faye Starlite, chanteuse

128 pages
Danny Shot
Pub date – November 2025
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-14-7
Florenz Eisman Memorial Collection - Poetry