Julie Kane is an assistant professor in the Department of Language and Communication at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Her poems have appeared in Feminist Studies, London Magazine, The Southern Review, The Formalist, and other magazines and journals, as well as in a dozen anthologies.

About Rhythm & Booze:

"Rhythm & Booze is packed with so many brilliant moments of poetry you want to call up friends and cry, "Listen to this!" Part Ray Charles and Phillip Larkin, part Dorothy Parker and Barry Hannah, some Mae West and Miles Davis, Kane's poems are so much fun they stick like the blues behind them. Nobody writes villanelles so effortlessly, nobody bares her teeth so brightly, nobody sashays so come-hitheringly, nobody is so formidably cool. Julie Kane is my discovery of the year . . . . You want the delights that only real poetry can give? Pick up Rhythm & Booze. And when you're done, give it to a friend who, I guarantee, will thank you for this trip through New Orleans, bars, bawdy days and nights, smoky songs, and the heart that can't help crying and dancing."
—Dave Smith, author of Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry

"Raucous yet poignant, vulgar yet elegaic, the poems in Rhythm & Booze bounce with the passion and verve of James Booker, a famed rythm and blues pianest, and Everette Hawthorne Maddox, a homeless poet, whose brief lives overlapped thirty years ago in New Orleans's historic Maple Leaf Bar. The lives of both men are memorialized here in such improbable forms as tightly rhymed couplets and brilliantly modified villanelles."
—Maxine Kumin