Synopsis:

Sad Jazz is a novel-in-sonnets, a sort of updating of the Petrarchan love sonnet sequence that follows a couple through their courtship, marriage, divorce and aftermath.  The sonnets in this book are largely metrically true, though a minority of them are experiments -- sonnets that shrink from 14 syllables to two, sonnets that use repetition instead of rhyme, blank verse sonnets, and so on.  To see Tony Barnstone's article on the craft of the contemporary sonnet, and what sonnet-writers today can learn from the tradition of free verse, see his "A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet" at The Cortland Review at this URL: http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/06/december/barnstone_e.html