13 Los Angeles Poets
Bombshelter Press, 1997 160pp
ISBN: 0-941017-47-8
The film noir protagonist of the '40s and '50s has been transformed into a "private-I" who drives down these mean freeways and slouches toward the self to be born. Work by Kathleen Zeisler Goldman, Stephanie Hager, diana jean, Mifanwy Kaiser, Stellasue Lee, Priscilla Lepera, Elaine Mintzer, Gilla Nissan, James O'Hearn, Jan Ruckert, Patricia L. Scruggs, Terry Stevenson, Jeremy Stuart.
The Editor
- Jack Grapes
- is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor and teacher, recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. He's the author of 13 books of poetry, and also wrote and starred in Circle of Will, which ran for several years in Hollywood and won drama critic awards for Best Comedy and Best Performance by an Actor.
Review
In these poets, we hear our own disillusionment. The contradictions of the human condition are subtle, and the oppresive heat of the once-cool West Coast burns through any pretense one may try to effect, so that all that is intimate is revealed; yet that intimacy is always separated by the poet's personally erected survival screen. The poets here speak in highly individualized voices about self-discovery. These L.A. poets are distinctly separate voices telling of each person's struggle against the anonymity of existence, but perhaps in that shared battle is their salvation because they are all--we are all--on the same journey.
New Jersey Tribune
