Another Way to Play ― Poems 1960-2017

The collected works of a poet who bridges the rhythms and message of the beats, the disarming frankness of the New York School, and the fierce temerity of activist authors throughout the ages.

From a '60s-era verse letter to John Coltrane to a 2017 examination of Life After Trump, Another Way to Play collects more than a half century of engaged, accessible, and deeply felt poetry from a writer both iconoclastic and embedded in the American tradition. In the vein of William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara, Lally eschews formality in favor of a colloquial idiom that pops straight from the page into the reader's synapses. This is the definitive collection of verse from a poet who has been around the world and back again: verse from the streets, from the the political arena, from Hollywood, from the depths of the underground, and from everywhere in between. Lally is not a poet of any one school or style, but a poet of his own inner promptings; whether casual, impassioned, or ironic, his words are unmistakably his own. Here is a poet who can hold two opposed ideas in mind simultaneously, and fuse them, with pathos and humor, into his own idiosyncratic verbal art. As Lally himself writes: "I suffered, I starved, and so did my kids, / I did what I did for poetry I thought /and I never sold out, and even when I did / nobody bought."

A former jazz musician, Hollywood actor, and radical organizer, the New Jersey-born Michael Lally has worn many hats over the course of his life. But throughout it all, he has written accessible, deeply felt poetry. Themes of identity, love, success, and failure pervade through his body of work, but always with wry humor and the simple grace that is the mark of deep thought. Lally is the author of thirty books of poetry and prose, including Stupid Rabbits (1971), White Life (1980), It's Not Nostalgia (1999) and Swing Theory (2015). Lally is the recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Eileen Myles is a groundbreaking novelist, poet, and performance artist, whose books include I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems and Chelsea Girls.