Night of the Manhattans
by Jennifer Juneau
Cover Art by Linda Wulkan

Praise for Night of the Manhattans

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Night of the Manhattans reads like a series of unfiltered texts sent in the middle of the night to a city that isn’t boyfriend material: its cheap food is expensive, its subways are unreliable, and it never shuts up. But it’s also wildly attractive and promises reckless good times, in basement dive bars, warehouse-district jazz clubs, and 24-hour diners. Juneau knows that a price will be paid in the morning and what it means to want salvation while flirting with self-destruction, and her streetwise poems, composed in the heat of such moments, move fluidly between the confessional and the performative, pulsing with the immediacy of a life lived on a knife’s edge.

 —Geoffrey Brock

 

With an inventive and fearless voice, Night of the Manhattans is a book of poems as fierce and gritty as the city itself.  These poems are electric, alive, and hypnotic.   At the core of the collection is an unabashed longing.  As the poems wander, dizzy, nearly recklessly across city streets, they ache with a wide-open heart.  As readers, the speaker’s secrets become ours, and we are luckily along for the ride. We “ruin ourselves” with tequila and dirty martinis, Tennessee whiskey and shots of bourbon for murderous men, on East 10th Street or Avenue A, in the 24-hour bodega, uptown, downtown, under neon-lit signs, kissing strangers in half-shadow moonlight, “pining for what is capable of breaking us.”  In poem after poem, Night of the Manhattans intoxicates.  Pull up a stool in a dark-lit dive bar, order up the cocktail made of whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters, and stay out with this brilliant, candid book long into the night. 

—Bonnie Jill Emanuel, author of Glitter City

 

Juneau's seductive poems shimmer inside a New York City that is at turns infuriating and magical. Each one unspools with reckless yearning as it reaches for the sublime. The result is breathtaking.

—Jonathan Vatner, author of Carnegie Hill and The Bridesmaids Union