One-Legged Poetry (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780998482910)

Jacko Monahan was born in Passaic, N.J., and grew up on the streets of Palisades Park. During the 1980s, he was the front man and lyricist for the punk rock/hard core bands Fatal Rage and Dirge. Fatal Rage put out a single eponymous LP in 1983, but the latter band released numerous recordings, including two LPs-Flesh Crawler and Soul Storm. Having begun his musical career as a teenager in Palisades Park, Monahan has worked in some forty different bands in a variety of genres, writing original lyrics for them all, and has appeared on at least thirteen recordings. He also served for twenty-three years as the booking agent at the Brighton Bar, an original music venue in Long Branch, N.J. He estimates that he put on 10,000 shows at the Brighton and other venues, such as The Saint and The Stone Pony in Asbury Park and The Court Tavern in New Brunswick. Among these shows were the monthly poetry readings at the Brighton Bar. Monahan started writing poetry when he was fifteen and has continued to produce poems at a prodigious rate ever since. "I had a fascination with words from an early age," he says. His work has appeared in Wanderlust, This Broken Shore, and The Idiom. A number of his poems appeared recently in Palisades, Parkways & Pinelands: An Anthology of Contemporary Poets (Blast Press, 2015).