Sonneteria

During his last year of painful illness, poet Jack Veasey left his final poetry manuscript with his long-time publisher, The Poet's Press. Veasey died in mid-2016, and this 216-page collection includes his collected sonnets (167 of them), a miscellany of other poems, and one Magick ritual. Sonnets, like Scarlatti sonatas, need to be relished a few at a time. Each visit to this vault of sonnets brings the reader new delights, humane observations and sometimes bitter jabs at the everyday, from the vantage of an "outsider." Veasey has observed that the rigor of the sonnet led him to say unintended things and find, in tight language, truths he did not know he knew.
Jack Veasey (1955-2016) was a Philadelphia native who lived in Hummelstown, PA for over 20 years. He was the author of twelve previous published collections of poetry, most recently The Dance That Begins And Begins (The Poet’s Press, 2015). His poems also appeared in many periodicals including Christopher Street, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Assaracus, Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology, The Philadelphia Daily News, The Painted Bride Quarterly, Fledgling Rag, Oxalis, The Blue Guitar, Bone and Flesh, Zone: A Feminist Journal for Women and Men, Film Library Quarterly (Museum of Modern Art, NYC), Experimental Forest, Tabula Rasa, Wild Onions, Mouth of the Dragon, Asphodel, Insight, The Irish Edition, The Harrisburg Patriot-News, The Harrisburg Review, The Princeton Spectrum, The Little Word Machine (U.K.), and The Body Politic (Canada), among others. Veasey spent the seventies and eighties working as a journalist for such publications as The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine, Pennsylvania Magazine, APPRISE, The Philadelphia City Paper, and The Cherry Hill Courier Post, and editing a number of periodicals in Philadelphia and New York, including The South St. Star, The Philadelphia Gay News, and FirstHand Magazine.