In Painting the Christmas Trees, Joe Weil explores the meaning of 
neighborhood, both its rootedness and its transience in terms of the 
port city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in which he was formed as a poet. 
His work mixes different registers of language, from the Rust Belt 
working class speech of his family and friends to the poetic influences 
of his first reading: Roethke, Williams, Stevens, and Yeats. His Irish 
Catholic working class upbringing instills his poetry with a sense of 
communion. The poems in this book are anchored to the loss and the 
brio of people he has known and worked among both as a toolmaker 
and as a poet. He is essentially a spiritual comic in so far as his 
interest lies as much with the vitally ugly and broken as it does with 
the smoothly eloquent. Unlike many volumes of poetry, Painting the 
Christmas Trees is full of characters, not unlike a novel. Weil believes 
a poet should reclaim the name of storyteller. He is not ashamed to 
be one.

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JOE WEIL was born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At the age 
of twenty he dropped out of Rutgers and became a toolmaker in order 
to help out his family. Weil remained a toolmaker for twenty years 
while writing and publishing his poems, building a reputation on the 
New Jersey/NewYork poetry scene. He is now an instructor in the 
graduate and undergraduate creative writing departments at SUNY, 
Binghamton. His previous books include In Praise We Enter, A 
Portable Winter, and The Pursuit of Happiness.