Making Tracks While I Can [CD]
$15.00
Making Tracks While I Can
Traditional Fiddle Tunes
Track Listing:
- North Carolina Breakdown
- Lost Indian
- The Girl I Loved in Sunny Tennessee
- Little Rose
- Miss Susan Cooper
- Gardenia Waltz
- Paddy, Won't You Drink Some Cider
- If I lose
- The Long Acre
- Olive Branch Reel
- Clinch Mountain Backstep
- Kitty Puss
- The First One to Love You
- The Denver Belle
- Temperance Reel
- Return from Fingal
- Dick Gossip's/Hunter's House
- Gum Tree Canoe
- Jenny on the Railroad
- [BONUS CUT] I've Had a Big Time Today
Product Details:
CD - Released 2021 by Bill Christophersen
Comments on the Album:
"This is primarily an instrumental collection. . . . Christophersen is shown to be an excellent fiddle player."
Hell & High Water: Old Time Fiddle Tunes CD
$15.00
Hell & High Water: Old Time Fiddle Tunes
This collection of Old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes, unaccompanied or accompanied by banjo, guitar, and mandolin features lonely Appalachian tunes, Southern rags, dance breakdowns and songs of love, faith and desperation.
Track Listing:
1. Widow Haley
2. Belle Lexington
3. East Tennessee Blues
4. Lone Pilgrim - Three Forks of Cheat
5. The Flood of '57
6. Crockett's Honeymoon
7. Shelvin' Rock
8. Beaumont Rag
9. Old Sledge
10. Leather Britches
11. Blind Fiddler
12. Sally In The Garden
13. Keys To The Kingdom
14. Abe's Retreat
15. Done Gone
16. Rocky Pallet
17. Searcy County Rag
18. Meet Me By The Moonlight
19. Hell Among The Yearlings
20. Cotton-Eyed Joe
21. Blind Steer In A Mudhole
Product Details:
CD - Released 2008 by Bill Christophersen
Comments on the Album:
"Hell & High Water is old-time fiddling at its finest"
--Les McIntyre, Bluegrass Unlimited
"Bill Christophersen is a master fiddler whose playing easily morphs from highly ornamented Texas style to the spooky, old-time modal sounds of West Virginia and Kentucky."
--Tom Druckenmiller, Sing Out!
Sugar Tree Stomp [Cassette Tape]
$10.00
Sugar Tree Stomp
Fiddle tunes from Ben Freed (guitar) & Bill Christophersen (fiddle)
Track Listing:
Side One
*Sugar Tree Stomp [1:30]
*Nervous Breakdown [3:15]
*Capri Waltz [2:30]
*Silver Spire [2:50]
*Virginia Darlin' [2:30]
*Magenta Morning [2:40]
*Whistlin' Rufus [3:40]
Side Two
*Hollow Poplar [1:50]
*Baby Bit The Spider [2:30]
*In The Middle Of Nowhere With You [2:55]
*Big Tiger Special [2:40]
*Five O'Clock Waltz [3:10]
*Petronella [2:40]
*Sugar Tree Stomp [2:40]
Cassette Tape Released 1995 Luddite Records
Its Shadow Rakes The Grass
$23.00
About "Its Shadow..."
In Its Shadow Rakes the Grass, the speaker confronts a parent's death and the polis's derangement with skepticism leavened by the shadow of a doubt.
Product Details:
Paperback, 110 pages. Published June 14, 2023 by Kelsay Books.
Praise for "Its Shadow..."
The well-carpentered, keenly-observed poems in Christophersen’s Its Shadow Rakes the Grass describe the beauties and disappointments of urban living, the heart-stopping, day-to-day challenge of caring for an ill parent, and insights drawn from nature and the news. These subjects are conveyed in highly accomplished sonnets and haiku, or in the voices of spicy characters you won’t meet in Manhattan conference rooms. You are in the hands of a master craftsman here; these poems will crack your shell.
—Bruce E. Whitacre, author of The Elk in the Glade
The title of this stunning collection by Bill Christophersen is taken from the last sentence of the last poem, “Shadow.” By the time you have read it, you will have traveled through every possible exploration of what “shadow” means. Many of these poems feature unforgettable, dangerous encounters that will leave your consciousness altered.
—Helen Engelhardt, author of The Longest Night/A Personal History of Pan Am 103
A key sequence in Its Shadow Rakes the Grass speaks to a time in our lives that we dread to face: taking care of a loved one who has changed into a person we might not always recognize. These poems display a meeting of intellect, heart and heartbreak. Only an adroit poet can turn “IV trees, their crimson fruit in bloom” into something beautiful. This book addresses the human condition in poems we can’t help but cleave to.
—Jennifer Juneau, author of More Than Moon
Why The Gods Don't Get It
$18.00
Why The Gods Don't Get It
Christophersen's fifth and most recent collection of original poetry. The collection leans noir and millennial. In its pivotal third section, sonnets on natural history converse with poems about twentieth-century atrocities. The personal, largely free-verse poems in sections one and four, set in the Bronx and Manhattan, reflect urban experience. Section two, lighter and more romantic, counterpoints those poems. As in most noir works, there is a crime to be engaged with, and greater and lesser crimes on its periphery. Theistic and agnostic viewpoints vie.
Product Details:
Paperback, 98 pages. Published December 9, 2021 by Kelsay Books.
Praise for "Why The Gods"
"In Bill Christophersen's Why the Gods Don't Get It, the gods may not get it, but the poet sure does. He know that suffering - of a people, a neighborhood, or a heart - is hard to detect from the distant view where a "four-car pile-up looks like tumbling dice" or a tenement going up in flames seems to be "blossoming." And so he moves in close with startling powers of observation, illuminating everything from the honed violence of nature and humans to the astonishments of love - a lover "delirious as a gyroscope," a widower "tenderized" by grief. With their exquisitely tuned music, lively wit, and formal brilliance, Christophersen's poems do what they promise, opening up doorways for us to know the world and ourselves up close, as humans need to. - Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought
"In Bill Christophersen's knockout new collection of poems, someone is screaming at "a gloved hand/ work[ing] a chisel under the window sash." The problem of evil is dramatized by a series of reluctant confessions: the neighbor who survived Bergen-Belsen, the mugged artist, the woman raped in her apartment. "Step back./ Turn down the sound. Pain / grows painless...," Christophersen cautions in language both colloquial and lyrical. Here is a poet who, like Dostoyevsky, insists that truth bought at the price of suffering is not worth the cost. - Marcus Cafagña, author of All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season
Christophersen's fifth and most recent collection of original poetry. The collection leans noir and millennial. In its pivotal third section, sonnets on natural history converse with poems about twentieth-century atrocities. The personal, largely free-verse poems in sections one and four, set in the Bronx and Manhattan, reflect urban experience. Section two, lighter and more romantic, counterpoints those poems. As in most noir works, there is a crime to be engaged with, and greater and lesser crimes on its periphery. Theistic and agnostic viewpoints vie.
Product Details:
Paperback, 98 pages. Published December 9, 2021 by Kelsay Books.
Praise for "Why The Gods"
"In Bill Christophersen's Why the Gods Don't Get It, the gods may not get it, but the poet sure does. He know that suffering - of a people, a neighborhood, or a heart - is hard to detect from the distant view where a "four-car pile-up looks like tumbling dice" or a tenement going up in flames seems to be "blossoming." And so he moves in close with startling powers of observation, illuminating everything from the honed violence of nature and humans to the astonishments of love - a lover "delirious as a gyroscope," a widower "tenderized" by grief. With their exquisitely tuned music, lively wit, and formal brilliance, Christophersen's poems do what they promise, opening up doorways for us to know the world and ourselves up close, as humans need to. - Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought
"In Bill Christophersen's knockout new collection of poems, someone is screaming at "a gloved hand/ work[ing] a chisel under the window sash." The problem of evil is dramatized by a series of reluctant confessions: the neighbor who survived Bergen-Belsen, the mugged artist, the woman raped in her apartment. "Step back./ Turn down the sound. Pain / grows painless...," Christophersen cautions in language both colloquial and lyrical. Here is a poet who, like Dostoyevsky, insists that truth bought at the price of suffering is not worth the cost. - Marcus Cafagña, author of All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season
Where Truth Lies
$18.00
Where Truth Lies
Bill Christophersen's fourth poetry collection, Where Truth Lies, treats its titular subject with levity as well as gravity. Its longest section features poems about a father's death woven into a cycle of calendrical sonnets. It concludes with a prize-winning translation of the Old English elegy 'The Seafarer,' that ancient specimen of spiritual truth-telling.
Product Details:
Paperback, 108 pages. Published Kelsay Books (March 26, 2020)
Praise for "Where Truth Lies"
"For Christophersen, truth is born in the Bronx and salted with ground glass. This is a bird watcher of starlings and grackles, a student of squirrels, a chronicler of death and dental work. And yet for all his urban grit, he is a Romantic. . . . Somewhere in this book, an indigo bunting flits through the starlings. And everywhere, beauty contrives to beat the odds, with mixed success."
--Tom Phillips, "Occupy the Arts" (blog)
"[Christophersen's] language is conversational. He uses dialogue. His rhymes are easy on the ear and unforced. . . . {Those] in 'A Defense of Poetry' sparkle with originality. Truth is discovered by the author in everyday situations and things, and in remarkably interesting detail."
--Richard Allen Taylor, Main Street Rag
"It was Keats, of course, who brought our attention to Truth and Beauty and their deceptive interchangeability. The beautiful and truthful poems of Where Truth Lies left me breathless with admiration. Bill Christophersen in a witty poet, and he’s a learned one, too, with echoes of his great forebears throughout, including Milton, Keats and Whitman. And yet the poet wears this learning with a blessed lightness. Indeed, Christophersen invites us warmly into his world here, including the sadness of loss with a father’s passing, and does so with a bracing formality at times, as in Emily Dickinson’s line: “After great pain a formal feeling comes.” I recommend these poems wholeheartedly."
—Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015
Tableau with Crash Helmet
$18.00
Tableau with Crash Helmet
"In Tableau with Crash Helmet, Bill Christophersen's collection of largely free-verse poetry, street narratives interface with beat parables and haiku sequences. Its subjects include bagels, gargoyles, bocce players, traditional musicians and a jellyfish museum."
Product Details:
Paperback, 104 pages. Published Hanging Loose Press; 1st edition (May 1, 2018)
Praise for "Tableau with Crash Helmet"
"The influence of Christophersen's native New York City runs through these pages like a watermark. In some of the poems, such as 'New York Minute' and 'Absolute Bagel,' the connection is explicit, but the whole collection is shot through with the city's ambience. . . . [ The poet explores] big issues through the lens of everyday events and everyday language."
--Brendan Donaghy, OnlineBookClub
The Dicer's Cup
$18.00
The Dicer's Cup
Bill Christophersen's The Dicer's Cup, as the poem by that name makes clear, takes its title image from a treacherous surf. The poems, whose mix of free and formal verse poet Valerie Wallace has praised, treat such subjects as bumming through Scotland and processing a grandmother's suicide. Christophersen is a bluegrass fiddler, and several of the poems draw on musical themes and contexts. Setting off the narrative poems is 'Apostrophes,' a lyrical sequence that addresses the millennium.
Product Details:
Paperback, 96 pages. Published July 2017, Kelsay Books
Praise for "Dicer's Cup"
“In Bill Christophersen's The Dicers' Cup, poetry gets shaken up. The familiar becomes exotic. Even the sonnets are ‘action painting[s] barreling off the canvas.’ ‘Street People’ pulls us in, implicates us; every line is good. In the end he implores God, with the eloquence of George Herbert, to speak plainly: ‘Tell me you remember me and/ always liked me.’”
—Jill Hoffman
“This book is full of performative portraits: the daredevils of childhood, the refrains of bluegrass musicians, dancers and landscapes that turn under into a new century. Bill Christophersen is equally at home with the formal line as with the free; his deep knowledge of verse gives us a songbook we want to open again and again.” (p) —Valerie Wallace
“If readers of Christophersen's poems were not made aware that he is also a bluegrass fiddle player, they might almost guess, as his poems distill the complexities of living into soaring, heartfelt music.”
—Mark Belair
Two Men Fighting in a Landscape
$18.00
Two Men Fighting in a Landscape
This debut collection of poems tell of a highway miracle involving a Martin D-18 guitar; of Joshua Bell fiddling anonymously in a park underpass; of an interstate excursion ending in an ill-advised meal of fried watercress. Here are snapshots of the Bronx before Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street. Here too, a translation of the Anglo-Saxon elegy “The Wanderer,” replete (like the Bronx) with charred ruins and gangbangers’ ghosts.
Product Details:
Paperback, 118 pages. Published August 13, 2015 by Aldrich Press.
Praise for "Two Men"
"The balance Christophersen achieves between verbal vitality and deep feeling is something rare in today's poetry." - Bill Zavatsky
"Bill Christophersen is a story-tell, and a good one, and - like all those accomplished in this mode - he knows how important the eloquent detail remains in bringing his renderings alive. In poem after poem these details flourish, not as contrived "poetic" images but as instances of the reality of the world he offers us." - Sydney Lea
