SASCHA FEINSTEIN received the 2008 Hayden Carruth Award for his book Misterioso. He has written two critical books, including Jazz Poetry, and co-edited (with Yusef Komunyakaa) The Jazz Poetry Anthology and The Second Set. He teaches at Lycoming College, co-directs the Creative Writing Program, and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.


“Music has been known to travel phenomenal distances in no time, and in Sascha Feinstein’s Ajanta's Ledge jazz tropes leapfrog the lived landscapes, from heart to heart, going wherever this authentic American voice dares to venture sonically and spiritually to places of earned solitude. In other words, in Ajanta's Ledge—from the public to the personal—this poet travels to the past, present, and future, surveying historical fissures while simultaneously creating those moments of healing that true art always reckons with.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

“A surge of joy in art, as in certain vocal music, not so much overcoming grief as joining it, even embodying it: that is the subject, the method and the appeal of Sascha Feinstein's Ajanta's Ledge: wide-ranging, heartfelt, and beautifully made.”—Robert Pinsky

“Whatever’s doing in the poems of Sascha Feinstein, whatever’s going on: great entertainment, prayers, a love song, a eulogy the DNA of every poem is love and jazz; it is American, demands freedom, celebrates life, the dignity of every human being. If poetry can do it, I can see this book saving lives.”—Stanley Moss