"Trumpets in the Sky" reminds us that poetry is vital and mystical. In this luminous collection, Jerry Garcia shows how poetry re-members us, brings us to kinship and connection. These poems allow our souls to catch up with us and points us to a larger love. Savor these poems and magic happens. Gregory Boyle Founder, Homeboy Industries Author, "Tattoos on the Heart"

These smart and powerful poems address the reader with insights into ordinary life and the outright surreal. The second half of the 20th century is inspiration and prism through which Jerry Garcia approaches the larger issues of culture, love, and mortality as well as the perennial instability of fire, flood, and quake endemic to the ground we walk on, and, thus, the psyche. Perhaps the best way to describe his work comes from his own words, “In the non-insulated garage of my mind, /a lone mechanic cranks his vise…” So his imagination moves, and so we follow. Don’t miss this book! Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night

Blaring title, yes, and yet I’m most drawn to the quiet of fine human observations, the still and meaningful realism, the visceral musings through which Jerry Garcia seeks to “illuminate this mood of apprehension” suffusing our world. I’m most moved by his persistent focus on the humane, “whittled from a life of misread instructions.” I can feel hope, “like a silk sheet weighted with sugar and salt,” call to me, pulse for me, enfold me, “tuning and retuning in service of unfinished songs.” Peter J. Harris, author, Bless the Ashes and Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’

The amount of grit, tenacity and sheer will it takes to survive in the 21st century can be daunting. Jerry Garcia accepts the challenge in his new book, Trumpets in the Sky, with a gaze that doesn’t flinch. After waking in a city “where trees grow from concrete” he pumps “in the hallways of complaint, /charged and caffeinated, /… to agitate your day.” (Espresso) This is an endurance race yet not one without humor or redemption. Indeed, who knew that many poets had a secret ambition to play professional baseball? (I Guess It’s Too Late to Be a Major League Baseball Player). A recent study showed that isolation and loneliness has increased dramatically over the last decade. These poems validate what many would consider too personal to write. In that way, they are truly heroic. Laurel Ann Bogen

In this collection, Jerry Garcia describes breath rising from a body in “leftover incandescence.” I can think of no more apt metaphor for these poems — they are shimmering and ragged, full of cosmic wonder and exhaustion. There are birds but also cars, galaxies and suburbs, pills and cubicles and Hawaii. The language startles. The pace avalanches. “I come to agitate your day” Garcia says, early on. But for all his quick mind, by the end of the volume he admits, “I am not the salvation the world needs / that once I thought I could be.” This book trumpets poems for tired souls who choose transcendence over surrender. A book not to change the world, but to unlock galaxies inside. Garcia writes: “let our joints resolve / into one heavy piece of the universe.” How does he capture so much weight and light at once? Brian Sonia-Wallace, Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, Author of The Poetry of Strangers

Jerry Garcia’s poems are both a celebration and a lament, a generational songbook notating the everyday and the not-quite mythic. “I am hunger on the run...” he declares in poems teeming with irony, sensuality and melancholy. A Southern California landscape is both a Golden Land and a wasteland, where “...the often grungy flatlands/sparkle like a box of jewels” and where the streets of Nichols Canyon are a “roadside canvas.” Ironically summoning a beat aesthetic and a surrealist imagination, García stays in the inescapable, imperfect present, where joy has meaning and beauty because of what has been lost or is fading. Ramón García, Ph.D. The Chronicle

Praise for Trumpets in the Sky