The Hatcheck Girl

Tony Whedon’s book The Hatcheck Girl vividly describes border crossings where language, culture and states of consciousness collide. In these richly layered poems about jazz most of the musicians we meet are sidemen: few are famous, most are notorious. They’re united, as he says in his opening poem “The Tradition of the New,” by their devotion to the music and by their appetite for a note, a phrase to “make it new . . . over and over.” Whedon is a poet of historical juxtaposition: in “The Peacocks” we meet both trumpet player Chet Baker and Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio on a lonely beach outside Naples. In “Head Wound” Whedon’s narrator, an expat jazz musician who’s suffered a head wound in WW II France, contemplates the beauty of late-14th Century illuminated manuscripts. Some poems in The Hatcheck Girl feature women – Whedon’s opera singer sister dying of cirrhosis in Manhattan, an aging torch singer in Jacksonville, a young, green female pianist in Paris – struggling to survive in a male-dominated art form. Others depict the lives of musicians who scuffle for gigs in out-of-way clubs because they both love the music and don’t know what else to do. Robert Pinsky has praised Tony Whedon’s “masterful verbal music,” and in The Hatcheck Girl Whedon, a jazz trombonist, is in command of the medium. His new collection is full of brilliant improvisational surprises.

Advance Praise for The Hatcheck Girl

“Here is the poet as jazz musician at the height of his creative power, fluent in the magic of written word and pursuing musical pathways that are hidden in shadow or bathed in furious sun. Like pieces of sculpture, Tony Whedon’s poems offer innumerable vistas and can be taken out of sequence or subjected to the reader’s own sequence. A feast no doubt, “The Hatcheck Girl” also offers beautiful garish Whedon watercolors that unite poetic and musical worlds.”
—Tom Fay, jazz pianist with Gerry Mulligan, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman

“The poet Hayden Carruth once said, “I’d have rather been a trombonist than anything else in the world,” and I know he would have relished this latest collection by Tony Whedon, who’s an active jazz trombonist in addition to being a writer. (Add painter to the mix and you have, as Duke Ellington dubbed Ray Nance, a triple threat.) . Everything in this varied, unfailingly honest collection swings.”
—Sascha Feinstein, editor of Brilliant Corners