Downtown New York City has had a great tradition of spoken word collaborations with music. The beats with beboppers. The African arts movement with free jazz cats. Nuyorican poetry punctuated with conga and timbale. Puma Perl is a writer who grew up on the Lower East Side becoming a legend on the scene as she allowed these movements to inform her poetry. But she also grew up on the garage rock that eventually morphed into what came to be known as punk rock. And over the last twelve years or so, she has perfected a collaborative performance style with musicians who experienced the punk scene as audience members and eventually as players.

Under Tenement Skies, Puma’s new release with the multi-instrumentalist and producer Joe Sztabnik, is a sort of love letter to the neighborhood in all its history and endurance, through the sounds that poured out of bars and from stoops throughout the ‘hood.

In the opening number, “Walking Down Tenth Street”, Sztabnik’s guitar rumbles down the boulevard as Puma paints a picture of windows and doorways observed by her alter ego, Belinda. We then move from the outside world to the inside with “I Stood in the Middle of the Room,” an enumeration of place with fuzz, feedback and woozy organ in support.

In “Where I’m From”, the sound gets more garage and Puma turns up the swagger as she speaks of bodegas and “sneakers on the window sills”. With “Something Better,” Puma spits rhythm over a heavier accompaniment, bewailing “oatmeal for dinner, and a chicken leg for breakfast”. “Ticket to Hell” transitions to the druggy Velvet Underground groove that you just knew was coming, as Puma struggles with her past habit while Joe hammers away on the piano (“…another apocalypse and we can’t be late…”). “End of the World” shifts into New York Dolls territory, a rocket fueled tempo peppered by bass pedal kicks courtesy of Dave Donen (who sits in on the kit expertly for three tracks) as Puma slurs, “Not the East Village, it’s the Lower East Side!”

Suddenly we ratchet things down to a spare background of loopy guitar like a VU ballad for “LES Past and Pandemic,” where the uncertainty of Covid seems to draw the neighborhood’s history together with the present when Puma celebrates “…cocaine and welfare cheese…kids sleeping under Star Wars sheets…” We finish with the poignant “What in the World,” a dreamy waltz sounding like Lou Reed just after he left the Velvets.

Time moves on relentlessly. Our history with the community bonds us through it all.

Though the tracks are all distinctive, the sequence of tracks makes for a satisfying and inspiring whole. With Under Tenement Skies, Puma Perl proves she is an artist at the apex of her career. Her collaboration with Joe Sztabnik could not be more seamless. By that I mean it absolutely rocks. It’s essential listening for those who dig the tradition. And what a tribute it is to the neighborhood she loves so.

David Lawton is the author of the poetry collection Sharp Blue Stream (Three Rooms Press) and chapbook Inspiritive (Moonstone Arts) and serves as an editor for greatweatherforMEDIA . Pixie Dust, the debut album from Hydrogen Junkbox, his lo-fi antifolk band with poets Aimee Herman and Eric Alter, is available on most major streaming services..