Search results for ""author david trinidad""

This suburban California coming of age navigates Trinidad’s personal history in the shadow of Hollywood, against the dramas of the 1960s and ’70s.“Trinidad’s pieces teach us how memory and history are forms of yearning, and about what can and cannot be recovered.” —Amy Gerstler “This is the writing of a poet who loves the world into language.” —Aaron Smith Poet David Trinidad’s past is rich fodder for a collection of memory pieces that wind the reader through the underbelly of 1960s and ’70s America—and Southern California, more specifically. In Trinidad’s recollections, the proximity to Hollywood both glamorizes and condemns the bustling suburbs. Stains of the Manson murders and adoration for The Boys in the Band are documented with the same care as fascinations with Barbie dolls and twelve-cent comic books. The struggles of an awkward gay teenager meld into the weighty anecdotes of a young man who befriends famous writers, acts as a historian for familial legacies, and confronts the limitations of desire. The title piece, “Digging to Wonderland,” presents a young David Trinidad and his friend Nancy as they tunnel into the ground of her backyard, in search of the next great adventure. Ultimately, we witness a childhood spent under the threat of annihilation: “So the ‘twinkly lights’ in the hills above Chatsworth were actually missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And without knowing it, I grew up under their spell.”

Read more less

For Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, poet David Trinidad watched all 514 episodes of the infamous 1960s 'adult' primetime soap opera and wrote a haiku for everyone. Fraught relationships, courtroom cliffhangers and sensational storylines are condensed into 17-syllable episodes, as stereotypic characters weather the passing TV seasons. This haiku 'soap epic' is ingenious, funny and totally addictive.

Read more less

A daring collaborative celebrity autobiography by two of America's finest poets, D.A. Powell and David Trinidad

Read more less

Turtle Point Press is pleased to introduce the Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series. These elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks feature short quotes meant to inspire, provoke, and guide users—to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Here is the ever-astonishing Emily Dickinson. David Trinidad was struck by the Magic 8 Ball sound in his favorite bits from Emily Dickinson’s poems—mystical answers to questions one might ask about life and death. He chose seventy-eight, the number of cards in a tarot deck, and found they worked. This is a superlative selection of indelible gems to guide, ponder, and quote. The set includes a display stand, plus an instruction card with tips on how to use the deck. This is pocket-sized wisdom to give and to keep, here in perfect time for the holiday season.

Read more less

The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet—widely available for the first time. In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith’s work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely “cry for civilization,” “Return to Lesbos”: put down that gun / stop electing Presidents. Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like “Fishing”: This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line. Ed’s vibrant “gang” of writer and artist friends—among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad—congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA’s west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others’ work. Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life. Ed Smith’s poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This “punk Dorothy Parker” is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.

Read more less

A Fast Life establishes Tim Dlugos-the witty and innovative poet at the heart of the New York literary scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic-as one of the most distinctive and energetic poets of our time. This definitive volume contains all of the poems Dlugos published in his lifetime, a wealth of previously unpublished poems, and an informative introduction, chronology, and notes assembled by the volume's editor, poet David Trinidad.

Read more less

This concentrated dose of the mystical wisdom of W.B. Yeats offers pleasure and insight to all who partake of it. “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon carries on the influential tradition of Irish mystical poetry with the great words of William Butler Yeats. Yeats had a lifelong interest in Spiritualism; his work is rich in tarot and occult imagery. He asserted that a number of poems were “given” to him by supernatural powers. Yeats’s fierce ideas and images, coupled with his exquisite sense of rhyme, make for quotes that seekers will want to commit to memory. As Paul Muldoon explains, this poet is “supremely positioned to help us make sense of both the things of this world, the Otherworld, and the vast region between.” The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season.

Read more less

A groundbreaking deconstruction of the classic 1950 film All About Eve, Phoebe 2002 is a collaborative epic poem/essay that zings in and out of scenes and makes a thousand connections within the world of popular culture. Drawing from high and low sources, the poets relate All About Eve to everything from Paradise Lost and The Odyssey to Rosemary's Baby, Silence of the Lambs and Scooby-Doo. Inspired by nine muses, including Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, all of whom make appearances throughout, Phoebe 2002 seamlessly pushes the limits of poetry and film criticism.

Read more less

Plainspoken, empowering, spare, wise beyond measure, Clifton’s words are a balm and a force of good for all: “The surest failure / is the unattempted walk.”Tracy K. Smith took a poetry workshop with Lucille Clifton following the death of her mother. The experience was an awakening. Clifton spoke of her own losses, centering not on the ideas of “letting go” or “making peace,” but of sustained communication with the departed. Clifton’s practices included using the Ouija board, or “spirit board,” as she called it, to make contact with the other world. “I sat rapt, envious, hopeful,” Smith writes, “listening to Clifton describe her own initiation into a fierce and forthright form of knowing.” Smith’s selections offer a gateway into the profound, moving, accessible, and useful notions of this essential poet. The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with a display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season

Read more less