Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film

This sequence of fifty 14-line poems uses the Zapruder Film of President Kennedy's murder as a prism through which to view America and the world. Refracted rays touch on crime and punishment; guilt and responsibility; charisma and love; the dying victim's experience during the stretched-out seconds of his violation and death; and the dark world of war profiteering, narco-traffic, and deceit where the facts of power determine history. Epic tradition (e.g., Homer, Dante, Milton) shares these pages with science, religion, and popular culture, now funny and now horrifying. Limousine, Midnight Blue is a haunted book about a haunted film of an event whose hungry ghosts still walk the American unconscious, rattling their chains louder every year.

Jamey Hecht was born in 1968, between the murders of Dr. King and RFK. He’s the author of Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999) and a translation, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2004). He has edited the books Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, and Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History by Larry Hancock. Jamey Hecht has covered Peak Oil and geopolitics at www.fromthewilderness.com, and has taught world literature at various universities. His PhD is from Brandeis, where he wrote on Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas. Hecht’s poetry and prose have been published in a variety of scholarly journals and literary magazines. www.jameyhecht.com