Life, if you're lucky, is long and memories stack up like books on a nightstand. There are the meaningful ones, the love and loss ones, the serious and important ones, but also the wild ones - nights out that started without a plan and ended up an adventure, hours' long conversations that evolved into debates, theses, setting the world to rights, encounters with strangers that led to unexpected friendships, sad nights that felt like endings. This collection is about those nights out and their memories, penned across pages during a pandemic that kept us all from even thinking about going out.
"Jiving off each other's wistful reminiscences of glittering nights out, Damien B. Donnelly and Eilín de Paor shimmer, shift and shimmy throughout the sassy and sumptuous 'In the Jitterfritz of Neon'. This book is alive with vivid and vibrant imagery, richly nuanced lyricism, sharply crafted syntax and playful narratives. Capped off with decadent humour and hard-won worldly wisdom, it is a delight of nocturnal exploits, stylish city scenes, romantic dalliances, high-spirited camaraderie and aches for the freedoms we once shared."
"Damien B. Donnelly and Eilín de Paor's dazzling collection of twenty poems shimmers and magnetizes with sensual, nostalgic, celebratory evocations of wild nights in Dublin, Amsterdam and New York. The poems complement each other in a beautiful dance, revelling in sensory experiences, friendship, desire and hope."
- Nathanael O'Reilly, Poet, author of (Un)belonging, Preparations for Departure and Distance
"'In the Jitterfritz of Neon' serves up a heady mix of poetic cocktails, taking you on a ghost world odyssey of epic wild nights out. A chatty mix of adventure and self-discovery, it swirls glorious recollections of those precious shared times out that shape us and imbue places with meaning."
"The live feed between Damien B. Donnelly & Eilín de Paor's sensual and deeply personal poems, is electrifying. The twinned hearts of these poems invoke duende as they beat their daring, striking rhythms."
