Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Player Piano (Dream 19)
“This slender booklet of 38 whimsical and lyrical pages of poetry is delightful to consume in the pauses of life. Saturated with swoon-worthy illustrations of romance and intrigue, Jeff's beautiful creation is like a dreamy stroll through a Pre-Raphaelite painting & a 16th-century French garden.”
A mysterious vision. A cryptic epiphany. A hopeful dream ballad for strange and dangerous times. Decorated with images adapted and collaged from “Chant d’Amour (The Love Song),” a painting by pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Coley Burne Jones, and the “Book of Flowers,” a 16th-century nature catalog illuminated for Queen Claude de France.
“Anyone who writes knows that some days you’re arranging driftwood and desert island beach stones, trying to signal an airplane, trying to jury-rig a radio telescope from the stuff in your pockets. And then, other days, you’re soaked catching high tide tsunami water in cups, scrambling to translate an alien transmission. This was the latter. These are strange days, to say the least. Here’s to better days ahead.” — J.B.M., May 202
Pennyring Press, 2022, Hardbound (36 pages, ISBN 978-1-716-92609-9) and Paperback (36 pages, ISBN 978-1-4357-8874-9)
Available at bookshop.org, Amazon, etc., etc.
DRIVEWAY CHALK STARS OF PAJAMA ASTRONOMERS: A YEAR OF HAIKU
“…a true artist through and through.”
— HAZEL SUN, Project: Do What You Love
A year of observation and reflection. Of snapshots, soundbites, and tiny stories. Of kōans, riddles, and magic tricks. Of meditations and revelations. A year of haiku.
This year-long project chronicles, in both words and images, the micro-moments of day-to-day life raising three young boys. illustrated with 60 black & white photographs.
“In a sense, writing the year of haiku was like taking photographs without a camera. I learned to see these haiku moments around me, wherever I was, because I told myself I had to. It wasn’t so much finding beauty or meaning in everyday things, but knowing I could find beautiful or meaningful things every day.” — J.B.M., 2020
Pennyring Press, 2020, Paperback (222 pages, ISBN: 978-1-79472-119-7)
Available at bookshop.org, Amazon, etc., etc.
Skin & Bones: Song Lyrics
“While it's often difficult to gauge the worth of pop lyrics printed on the page without musical accompaniment, it's remarkable how well SKIN & BONES reads, as lyrics in the poetic sense. Jeff's lyrics considered as poetry at their best evoke the only-just stylistically-belated, yet entirely individual and intense poems of Weldon Kees; even at their least effective, they have the readable lightness of Edward Arlington Robinson, and everyone knows Paul Simon made ‘Richard Corey’ a better song than it ever was a poem, which illustrates my point nicely.”
Named for a lyric from his album Jeff Mellin Saves the World (Stereorrific, 1999), the book covers songs from Mellin's bare-bones coffeehouse days to his later power-pop material. With photographs by rock photographer John Soares and an introduction by poet Garrett Caples.
Kolourmeim Press / Stereorrific Recordings / Big Blue Ox (May 1, 2009), Paperback (91 pages, ISBN: 978-0615181264)
