A More Prosaic Light

The essays from the pen of Daniel Weeks in A More Prosaic Light range from social and political commentary to literary criticism and reminiscences about the literary and cultural scene on the Jersey Shore. Weeks tackles topics as diverse as Hollywood movies, middle school jitters, Thanksgiving, the dying fishing industry in New Jersey, Edison's phonograph, heat waves, the great Englishtown Auction, Romantic poetry, and the elusive American Dream. Weeks’s literary essays also range widely from the poets of the British canon—Coleridge, Keats, and Yeats—to American moderns and contemporaries—Amiri Baraka, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, and Louise Glück. The essays and reviews here are interspersed with Weeks’s reminiscences of his encounters with various writers, which provide an entertaining inside view of the literary scene on the Jersey Shore during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.