Well You Needn't, Joel Lewis's seventh volume of poetry, gathers his poems about the music that has occupied him since his teenage years. The prose memoir "My Life as a Jazz Fan" weaves its way through the book as the background story to his particular obsession. He has taught at an assortment of places, organized reading series along (or below) the Hudson Palisades and curated lectures at the Poetry Project for two seasons. As a staff writer at the New Jersey performing Arts Center Newark, he wrote program notes and was able to interview many of his jazz heroes. Kim Lyons has noted of his poetry: "There is no one writing quite like him. As if Charles Olson and Susie Timmons had a baby." He shares his Hoboken garret with his wife, film theorist Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, who tolerates the poet's Cecil Taylor albums blaring from his alcove workspace.

Joel Lewis is the author of My Shaolin (2016), North River Rundown (2013), Surrender When Leaving Coach (2012), Learning From New Jersey (2007), Vertical's Currency (1999) and House Rent Boogie (1992), winner of the second (and last) Ted Berrigan Memorial Award. He edited Bluestones and Salt Hay, an anthology of contemporary NJ poets, as well as editing Reality Prime, the selected poems of Walter Lowenfels and On The Level Everyday, the selected talks of Ted Berrigan. A social worker by day, he has taught creative writing at the Poetry Project, The Writer's Voice and Rutgers University. And, for better or worse, he initiated the ill-fated New Jersey Poet Laureate position that was such a headache for Amiri Baraka. With his wife, Rutgers University cinema professor Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, he resides in Hoboken.

"Well You Needn't pops between New Jersey record shops, bar conversations with Ted Berrigan, and the reconfigured voices of LP liner notes, like the best type of cultural playlist. Lewis generously gives us his life as a jazz fan packaged in the other greatest genre we have: poetry. 'Hey, Joel, are you still listening to that goddamned avant-garde shit?' Thank God he is." — Nick Sturm

"Whether you are familiar with jazz or not, instead of shying away, first play Thelonious Monk's 'Well, You Needn't,' which the title of the book is taken from. Then, turn the pages & open your heart & soul & delve into the miraculous fruits of universal beauty & wisdom of the jazz presented here." — Yuko Otomo

"Well You Needn't is the lost document, the map instructing us in our happy shock to that healthy ghost village, a village never aware that we imagined it extinct. Horace Silver, Wayne Marsh, Archie Shepp, Bobby Timmons—each sainted agent— emerges from behind the curtain." — Archie Ran