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This is the true story of what happened when Lisa Gill threatened to hold up an MRI clinic in 2003. Using poetry, prose, and art, her memoir takes a powerful look at both personal and institutionalized violence and explores how a hard-won medical diagnosis left her searching to understand the history of violence in her life and its consequences for her health.
Closing the Hotel Kitchen is about war and about falling apart when that is the only route left to sanity. It takes place from the 1960s to the early 1970s, from New York’s streets to Vietnam and India. Untouched by sentimentality, these poems offer a visceral look at the narrator’s attempts to find coherence within a violent world. But Bohm’s often dark lyricism also offers more than a journey into an abyss. His poetry, displaying a capacity to listen to others’ voices and assimilate their experiences, provides glimpses of transformation.
These poems from the last decade of Paula Gunn Allen’s life capture the variety, ingenuity, and audacity of the her work. According to Allen, what makes America beautiful is its unfulfilled promise: its horrors confront its hopefulness. Allen’s book is at once a bonfire made up of the ruins of civilization, a call for one more effort to set things right, and a gift to us all from this fertile, generous writer.
Walking Backwards is about making a home when you are a nomad and adding an American self to the many selves that the world’s myriad, bewildering places throw at one body. It is about how travel and restlessness wrench us and teach us about ourselves, how our losses compound our loves, and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it.
Beginning in December of 2008, West End Press launched The New Series of poetry, “full-length volumes by new and recently recognized poets.”
This collection is an exotic, aphrodisiacal perfume wafting through the senses, thickly spiced by the dual nature of a poet whose culture and experience effortlessly blend concrete imagery with a quiet, fierce longing for a world that may only exist within memory—or verse.
Departing from her mother’s Japanese name, “One Thousand Cranes,” these poems bring a message of trauma and recovery, war and reconciliation, and the passage from personal shame to self-regard. They are historical, political and personal in the same breath.
The poems in This Business of Wisdom suggest a syllabus of the lessons each human faces “as you grow, persistent but clumsy, into your bones.” With sometimes playful, often pointed language, the author draws upon nature, music, dreams and current events to illustrate how to gain one’s place in the world.
