“experimental bellow and love utterance, jazz spells urge [us] to rage and energize as [we] heal the world.”

 

Equal parts experimental bellow and love utterance, Claudia Saleeby Savage's new collection, metal used for beauty alone, is a plea for music as prayer, music as protest and balm, music as change. Macbeth's witches perform jazz spells to urge the musician to rage and energize themselves as they heal the world.

Metal Used for Beauty Alone is a three-a.m. jam session. These free form poems levitate off the page. Savage anoints the reader with praise songs, spells, tributes to jazz legends and the quickening of the saxophone’s textural meaning and full register. These witches hold nothing back. —Jacqueline Johnson, author of A Woman’s Season 

Claudia Saleeby Savage’s provocative, transcendent poetry brilliantly captures the energy of live music, providing a perspective that can only come from inside the band onstage. This book is for those who find the systemless system of free jazz relaxing. Those who, like our fearless narrator, have had their hearts “savaged by grief” and “hate boxes.” Along with Pharoah Sanders, John and Alice Coltrane, and the author’s husband and musical partner John Savage, metal used for beauty alone “blows a horn to heaven.” —Christopher Luna, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA and founder of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic     

Metal Used for Beauty Alone proposes and enacts a world where instruments prevail in production and resonance over guns. Through careful visual composition and an experimental spirit that even the legends of jazz would admire, this chapbook pops off with flushed language and jolting creativity. Lively scores (not deadly shots) fire as we read, led by Saleeby-Savage as our witch observer who can “stun the moon,” “hush the sirens,” and “refold our brains” to sort out systemic violence. The poet is a proxy to musicians, together disarming a trigger-happy death grip in favor of the power of clapping sax keys, markings for breath, and collapsing wordplay. Society in Metal Used for Beauty Alone is populated by healing dissonance, spiritual jazzers, and live shows, all pistoling a post-military-industrial complex through poetry... inviting us to tarab instead of annihilate. —Katherine Factor, author of A Sybil Society: Poems