BRANT LYON & FRIENDS: Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me (LOGOchrysalis Productions 2008) brings poetry / spoken word and music together into a new realm. Call it POEMusic. Eight evocative, provocative, poets perform a wide variety of styles intricately woven with an equally broad range of music genres ranging from hard-driving R&B to blues and jazz, world music, ambient/soundscapes, and more. The listener is beckoned, seduced, or catapulted deeply, delightedly, sometimes unsettlingly and shockingly, into the sound and sense of the poet's world. But always with the incisiveness of a knife called Beauty that cuts to one's core! It may be a lovelorn Fellini-esque romp through the midway of Coney Island, a haunting meditation on love and eternity amid the temples of war-torn Cambodia, meditations on meditation itself in an Indian ashram, an in-your-face rant turning plea for peace between Israel and Palestine, the story of the world’s first reported alien abductees, or a smoky interpretation of what jazz great Charlie Parker's genius might have to do with frying chicken! Throughout it all, no matter how at times far-fetched, love and its corollaries of pain and pleasure infuse the entire collection. It takes its inspiration and title track from the intriguing words of the 14th century Sufi mystic-poet, Hafiz, who declared, “Good poetry makes the universe admit a secret: ‘I am really just a tambourine--play me against your warm thigh!’” Original music by Brant Lyon accompanying his own poems and those of noted poets reciting their own work: Hawley Hussey, Frank Simone, Diana Gitesha Hernandez, E. J. Antonio, Farid Bitar, Anne Cammon (with Rob Voisey), and Robin Small-McCarthy. "Brant Lyon's musical arrangements are bitchin'!! Wild and soulful." - Rob Ross, celebrated blues guitarist / songwriter (The Robert Ross Band) "Brant Lyon has put together an odd match of poems / poets and music in one of the strangest / eclectic music and poetry CDs I have ever encountered." - Steve Dalachinsky, legendary New York downtown poet "Brant Lyon & Friends' Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me cooks up a serious cauldron of cosmic soup for the ear. It's a one pot meal for the soul!" - Carol Lipnik, singer/songwriter (Carol Lipnik & Spookarama)