Jack Shiner is retired from the work world, where that journey began as a Newspaper Boy for the Detroit News in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan where he was born and raised in Royal Oak. And the journey was concluded after a twenty-two year stint as a Stationary Engineer in three San Francisco Bay Area hospitals. In between, he worked five teenage summers in a bakery followed by a variety of jobs which included factory work, Printing, Banking and as a Fire Alarm Systems Inspector and Technician. The first creative work he recalls inventing was a little song he made up at the age of five as he walked along holding his mother’s hand on the streets of Beacon, New York, where the family was living at the time. It was a song he called “The Man with a Big Fat Nose” which, Shiner says, is better left unheard. Although he created a few little ditties and scribbled down a few lines in his childhood, it wasn’t until he was fourteen years old that he felt he was a poet and would continue to be so for life. A poet whose every word should be chiseled into marble and marveled at for all ages to come... (or so the fourteen-year-old Shiner thought at the time). It was nearly twenty years later when a friend suggested that Shiner should publish a book of his poetry for all the world to see. So, at a time before the Internet and digital printing, Shiner began the work of typing and manually creating layout boards in a garage in San Francisco for each page of a book to be called “Whispering Sands and Other Poems”. And it was then, in 1989, when he discovered that selling poetry was about as easy as making a sculpture from air. Wanting to publish again, but in no hurry to lose money once more, Shiner waited until 2004 to publish his second book “Raking Leaves - Poems”. He was amazed to find that printing technology had changed to the point of the whole publishing process being digital. No layout boards, drawing table or drafting tools, not a piece of paper needed to be touched.
A year later, while sitting at the dinner table, Shiner’s then ten-year-old son Frank asked if he was going to publish a third book. Shiner said, “Yes”. Frank asked what it would be called. Shiner said, “Stunning Jagged Edges of Precise Malfunction”. Frank went into giggle-fits and Shiner saw that as a positive sign that the right title had been found. And so it was in 2005.
Since then, Shiner has continued to write and presents in his newest book “Ever More Accurate Atrocities of Competence” many new poems, as well as selected poems from his previous three books. And why would he do that? Shiner says: "I write it because I’ve always known that even if you don’t need it... I do."
"Enjoy my book and please... read poetry responsibly" -Jack
