The Jersey Slide

By Danny Shot

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