This collection of narrative poems is a meditation on the life and music of one of the truly great artists of the twentieth century and an impressionistic exploration of the connection between personality, identity, celebrity and art. There are deliberate rough edges here and third-rail examinations of sex, race, gender, addiction and psychological dysfunction. Billie Holiday made no apologies for who she was or how she lived. In these poems, Joel Peckham, evokes her rich and vibrant personality with a music and passion worthy of his subject.

"A Chevy up on blocks is only an eyesore to the faithless."-from "Husks" In GOD'S BICYCLE, Joel Peckham's fifth collection of poetry, he offers a spiritual road mix for 21st-century America. In poems that travel from the heartland through Appalachia to New England, he sings a song crafted from his own strange brew of off-kilter, irreverent psalms, prayers, hymns, aubades, and elegies in praise and homage to a fragmented but beautiful landscape and people. Drawing as much from rockabilly as Whitman, these poems are always intense and often exuberant, even in their struggle for the kind of hope...