Since the turn of the century, there have been hundreds of poems responding to jazz in all its musical and cultural overtones. Although many people associate this union only with the poetry and jazz readings of the Beat movement, the range of poetic and jazz anesthetics, not merely from writers across the United States but from countries around the world as well, embraces an enormous, cross-cultural gathering of writers. This anthology represents many of those responses and the broad appreciation for jazz as poetic inspiration.