Picnic on the Moon: Poems
Known for his powerful readings and unusually warm and compassionate voice, Charles Coe’s poems speak to the heart and mind as well as the ear. Combining subjects as diverse as Afro-American history, myth, jazz, and family as well as surprising observations of those unexpected moments of joy to be found in a work-a-day inner city life, Coe offers us poems as personal as the tale of a sister who opened his life to literature and closed her own with dope; as quietly momentous as the story of Rosa Parks. Here are poems for Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Mingus alongside a haunting homage to the ‘guests’ of a battered women’s shelter. Above all, Coe’s poems touch upon what is essential in us all and speak of life as a gift that is far from perfect but all we have.
Charles Coe is the winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship. A jazz and popular vocalist, he was born in Indianapolis, lives in the Boston area and travels widely to perform and record his work.
Charles Coe is a poet, prose writer, teacher of writing and a musician (vocals and didgeridoo).
Charles has written five books of poetry: “Picnic on the Moon,” “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents,” “Memento Mori,” “Purgatory Road, and “Charles Coe: New and Selected Works,” all published by Leapfrog Press. He has also written “Spin Cycles,” a novella published by Gemma Media. “Peach Pie,” a short film by filmmaker Roberto Mighty based on his poem “Fortress,” has been shown in film festivals nationwide. “Charles Coe: Man of Letters,” also created by Roberto Mighty, was named “Best Short Documentary” at the Roxbury Film Festival.
Charles received a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light in 2014” and spent 2017 as an Artist-in-Residence for the city of Boston, creating a project that collected oral histories of people who live and work in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.
Teaching poetry and prose is a special interest. Charles teaches in a wide variety of settings, including grade schools, high schools, colleges, writing conferences and workshops. He has served as poet-in-residence at Wheaton College and at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York and has taught in Dingle, Ireland for the Bay Path University MFA Abroad program. He is also an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, teaching poetry and non fiction in the low-residency MFA program.
He was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana but has lived in the Boston area since 1975.
