I hope it's not over, and good-by.

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I hope it's not over, and good-by: Selected Poems of Everette Maddox

Edited by Ralph Adamo

ISBN:1-60801-000-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-60801-000-4

Paper, 5.5 x 8.25, 168 pages
16.95 (Order Now)

October, 2009

UNO Press is proud to announce publication of the first volume of Selected Poems by legendary New Orleans poet, Everette Maddox. Maddox moved to New Orleans after completing his study at the University of Alabama in the '70s and soon became one of the guiding lights of the local poetry community. He inaugurated the Maple Leaf Bar reading series, now the oldest continuously running reading series in the South, and his life and work left an indelible mark on an entire generation of poets.

Ralph Adamo's selection from Maddox's four books provides an accessible introduction to readers new to the work, but in its novel organization it also suggests new and surprising readings for those who know the work, or thought they did.

Listen to a recording of Fred Kasten's interview with editor Ralph Adamo on WWNO, 1-27-2010.

Read the review from The Times Picayune.

Read the review from The Press Register (Mobile, AL)

Everette Maddox was all poet and died for it— the Christ of New Orleans— but not before he hosted a good army of angel-poets who can be found all over these states.
—Andrei Codrescu

In all the thunderous herd of contemporary poetry, I don’t think I know anyone who has so completely captured his own voice, his own being, in his work as Everette Maddox. This book is Everette Maddox. It pleases me to think that the best of these wonderful poems, like “Crunch,” “Breakfast,” “Disaster Poem,” or “The Miracle,” appear to be effortlessly carved on the morning air, floating there like beautiful little spider webs beaded with dew. Seemingly benign and even fragile, they’ve caught you before you know it.
—Leon Stokesbury

In New Orleans, Everette Maddox is to poetry what Marie Laveau is to voodoo and Buddy Bolden to jazz. His legend haunts the streets he lived on, the bars where he drank and wrote and read his poems. As Ralph Adamo says in his Introduction, everyone has their own Everette, “and then we have the poems.” This long-overdue selected brings together a substantial body of Maddox’s work— much of it long out of print. It presents Maddox as a poet “exploding within the memory trace of an older idea of form”— at once tragic and humorous, plain spoken and “cagily ensconced in his own words.” I hope it’s not over, and good-by will be treasured by those of us who were already fans of his poems and introduce him to the larger audience he deserves.
—Grace Bauer

This book frames an outpost of exigencies in poetics never before realized on the American terrain. Everette Maddox lived poetry in the saddle, fast and loose, slaking his muse with a reckless grace, all the while knowing it was the ultimate high stakes gamble – not just to win, but to break the house. Taken together, these poems exact some of the most deadly quotients of realness ever to appear in 20th century writs. If today’s mission for the poet is to present a staggering neo-ancient command of alphabets hell-bent on liberating the polyphonic sensibilities of the human vernacular, mission accomplished! Truth be told, for any modern day troubadour who intends to carry forth the torch in poesy, this is where to find it.
—Dave Brinks

[This work] captures so palpably the nuances of Maddox’s speaking voice that to read it is to almost touch the man: the savage world-cartooning wit, the sense of beauty and civilization, the carnal-cry, the fascination with history, the resigned and stoically self-caricaturing romantic. It is, as Bob Woolf pointed out… jazz… New Orleans jazz…
—Rodney Jones

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A man squats by the railroad tracks tonight
eating a moon fragment: not cheese
at all, but a honeydew melon. His hands
are fuzzy. A train roars past. In the
lighted windows men and women stand
with pewter cups raised. Tea slops out.
Then it is dark again. Moon-eaters have
no time for such foolishness. The silence
is not absolute, though, because the world’s
longest accordion, the world’s longest
musical expansion bridge, is playing
somewhere. I am up in my office
watching the glitter of my last cigar sail
out the window, over the shrubbery, down
into the darkness where summer is
ending. I keep office hours at night so
nobody comes around to bother me. Not even
you. The moon comes around, though. I want to
drag it down and hand it to you and say, “Here,
this is lovely and useless and it cost me
a lot of trouble. You can tie it up on
the river behind your house, and go down to
look at it whenever you like.” The trouble is,
you don’t want it tied up, and you are
right. This is no new problem. Eight hundred
years ago a man heads home from the
Fair, pushing a wheelbarrow full of real
moon pies. For ten years he has been
stealing wheelbarrows, and nobody even
suspects. Well, what is all this? you
want to know. Right again. I could
say I don’t know myself because the evidence
is not all in, never will be. I could say it’s
the unfinished moon poem I’ve always wanted
to almost write. Well, what is it all about? you
ask. What does it mean? You have me
there. It means, whatever this is between
you and me, I hope it’s not over, and good-by.

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