Week 29 Reading (2026) – Joiner & Morrison

This turned out to be a week accidentally dedicated to jazz. Any fan of jazz will enjoy Fred L. Joiner’s wonderful book of poetry, The Mirror in Our Music. It includes two series of poems in which he responds to photographs. I also passed the halfway mark in my way through the fiction of Toni Morrison. I finished Jazz, the sixth of her eleven novels. It happened to be the one she wrote the year before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite the title, however, the book’s plot has more to do with murder than with music. Fred L. Joiner. The Mirror in our Music. Minneapolis: Birds, 2026. This is a dos-a-dos book. You read Side A, then you flip the book over and read Side B. In Side A, Joiner’s poems are dedicated to the music he loves (mostly jazz), some Black writers, and the street life and people of the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where he lived for years. Several of these poems are paired with works of art by Black artists and with one photograph by…