Poetry and blues meet at the crossroads in this CD by poet and blues musician Dick Lourie. Many of these poems appeared in Lourie's book Ghost Radio (Hanging Loose, 1998), now in its fourth printing. Here Lourie turns them into musical collaborations with an assortment of skilled blues band professionals, speaking the poems himself and adding tenor sax solos. Special guests include acclaimed blues performer Big Jack Johnson, and teenage musicians from the Mississippi Delta. The CD also features a version of Lourie's poem "Forgiving Our Fathers," which many remember as the moving climax to the popular film Smoke Signals.

"Ghost Radio Blues, Poetry and the Blues, a new CD by Dick Lourie, is a primer in those two arts, in how music and poetry fit, on what a poet who is a super musician can do when he is wailing mutuality. Lourie, from Boston, is known as an editor for Hanging Loose Press, publisher of his book Ghost Radio in 1998. His talents as poet and musician kill on this homemade CD. Unmissable please."

--Bob Holman

  Since 1968, Dick Lourie's poetry has appeared in such publications as Verse, Exquisite Corpse, The Massachusetts Review, ACM, Sun, and Ms. Magazine. This is his seventh individual collection. With Mark Pawlak he co-edited Smart Like Me and Bullseye, two anthologies of high school writing from Hanging Loose Press. He is an experienced poetry workshop consultant, and has worked extensively with students and teachers in school poetry programs. A musician as well as a poet, he plays tenor sax and trumpet. Ghost Radio includes the complete text of the poem "Forgiving Our Fathers," which is featured in the movie Smoke Signals.

Lourie has been an editor at the University of Massachusetts Boston since 1985. He and his wife, Abby Freedman, an independent film maker, live in Somerville, Massachusetts.

"Dick Lourie's work has never failed to give me a keen sense of his integrity and individuality. His sturdy syllabic prosody provides a natural framework for his quintessentially American themes . . . . It's good to hear his voice again after a lapse of some years--a voice he found early, and which speaks with a unique and convincing eloquence."

--Denise Levertov

"Dick Lourie's poems are like sudden, dramatic snapshots of true feeling and memory: of friends, family, life, death, and--maybe most of all--music."

--Alison Lurie

"Poetry promises to hold so much: love and death, friendship and anger, history and politics, music and humor. Dick Lourie's poems not only deliver on the promise, they suffuse each of these things with all the others, so that we are soon reading (among other things) a comic history of the politics of music, as refined by rage and polished by friendship. Ghost Radio is a delicious blend."

--Lewis Hyde

"Dick's poem ["Blues From Clarksdale"] pretty much sums up our band in a brief and simple way. It's Dick's understanding of the band that allows him to come and play with us with such enthusiasm. His sax playing adds a complete and exciting taste to the band which puts a smile on everyone's face--the audience's and especially ours."

--Big Jack Johnson

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