Poetry. For most of the 1970s, Paul Pines owned and operated the Tin Palace, a jazz club that hosted figures like Kurt Vonnegut and Martin Scorsese, and gave expression to the most notable jazz innovators of that time. The club was honored by the Tribeca Center for the Performing Arts as a "lost jazz shrine," and featured in Perfect Sound Forever as a venue that "... paved the way for today's ... live music scene." The poems in this book rise from the improvisational impulse that produced not only Eddie Jefferson and Charlie Mingus, but painters Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers, and many of the poets drawn to the corner of 2nd Street and Bowery. Like the music he championed, Pines takes on the personal and universal themes of love and loss, the ironies of shifting alliances and archetypal forces, destiny, and the gods who honor those they destroy, in Parker-like solos that leap into the moment to create an arc that moves with undiminished urgency.

Poetry. Infused with an eerily adept understanding of Latin American history and culture dating from the 15th century to modern times, their collective duende, REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR will come to stand as a monumental work and as a companion piece to the epic Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This collection of poems takes on the true power of myth--Wayne Atherton. REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR tells the story of the fall of an ancient, vibrant civilization to Spain's conquistadors under Cortez. Pines's language is intelligent and refreshing, his ideas provocative, his images striking, and his narrative--however tragic--dramatically thrilling. This book is a smoking mirror--Maurice Kenny.

Poetry. With art by Wayne Atherton. "The sea's endlessness, its glittery surfaces, the often scruffy island life of the Bahamas are wonderfully recorded in Paul Pine's FISHING ON THE POLE STAR. Bright-scaled marlin populate the text, as do Wayne Atherton's mysteriously beautiful collages. The vision is spacious and colorful, awe- filled and deep dwelling." Michael Heller "FISHING ON THE POLE STAR is full of wonder, for Pines knows that fishing correlates with the Arthurian Graal- search, the poet's hunt for the poem, the deep sea-voyage to heal the wounded soul. This collection places him in the tradition of Hektorovi, Walton, Melville, Hemingway, and Hughes." Richard Berengarten"

Poetry. "'Remember this, ' the poet tells himself as he races his 'little girl': 'what is a memory that anticipates itself / a recollection / that becomes / the ground on which the present plays.' And we follow, drawn along a 'golden thread' between father and daughter that is at once binding and unwinding, the reweave of every Charlotte's Web. Here are poems, in the language of the luminous moment, full of the timeless, of time's surprise, of all that enraptures, all that sorrows, all that joys." Robert Murphy, author of From Behind the Blind"

Poetry. "As Paul Pines moves through two cities he reminds us that 'we go where we must to find / what we need.' And what he finds is plenty plenty in all senses and for all the senses. From poems that hang out in the crazy costumes, poignant hilarities, and irreverent reverences of Mardi Gras, to those that fly with hermes over the roofs of Paris, explore light with Monet and Pissarro, and walk graveyards in the wake of Apollinaire this book brims, seethes, teems, with qi, duende, life. Here is a magnanimity of vision that touches myths, rituals and philosophies, that garners pasts, presences and absences, that engenders probabilities, realities and impossibilities. Encompassing space-travel, dream-travel and mind-travel, here is an immense, vibrant, moving canvas." Richard Berengarten"

Poetry. "In these beautifully crafted poems Paul Pines takes us on a dizzying ride through mythological and religious thinkers, through science and philosophy. It is the quest of a man trying to hear the 'music / beneath the music' that he hopes, doubts, believes is there DIVINE MADNESS. Pines asks what it means to face death and despair, what it means to doubt meaning while believing in meaning, what it has meant through the centuries." Susan Sherman "With extraordinary daring and inspiration, Paul Pines has dedicated the art he has exquisitely crafted for a lifetime to the service of the divine madness that has always distinguished poetry from mere writing. In relentless pursuit of the unity we instinctively crave, he captures the universal analogy anew by 'connecting us to the consciousness of the gods in men' through dazzling poem after poem in this stunning book." George Economou"