Dear Prudence
New and Selected Poems
Published on 22. September 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
496 pages
978-1-933527-47-5 (ISBN)
Description
The collection that David Trinidad fans have been anticipating for years - soulful works of tenderness, wit and formal ingenuity. With assurance, grace, honesty and brilliant craftsmanship, David Trinidad writes about collecting, losing and recollecting. His work is a study of detail and devotion; in the words of poet Elaine Equi, 'no other writer makes the interface between our private memories and cultural ones appear so seamless'.
Reviews / Votes
Although Trinidad now lives in Chicago, he is best known as a 1980s Los Angeles poet (working alongside Dennis Cooper and Amy Gerstler) who moved to New York at the height of the AIDS crisis (occasionally registering its toll) and refined a version of James Schuyler's singular dailiness while indulging pop obsessions. The poems are a pleasure to read: anyone who loves Schuyler, cats, Barbie, or Heddy LaMarr can flip to nearly any page and find sparkling observations. The poems of domestic bliss with Ira, Trinidad's former partner, form a diaristic bloc that reads like a postcard version of the New York School. The poems chronicling the lives and rivalries of his peers (including Tim Dlugos), along with their relationships with poetic luminaries like Schuyler, form an important poetic record. And the poems of sex with strangers, and others, capture real immediacies. The 125 pages of new poems that open the volume are largely valedictory looks back: "So I'm in the frozen food aisle/ at Jewel, trying to find the right/ veggie burger, and I realize/ "Blitzkrieg Bop" is playing on/ the store's P.A. Thirty years later:/ the Ramones as Muzak? Hard to Believe." --Publisher's Weekly reviewMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chappaqua
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 41 mm
Weight
816 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-933527-47-5 (9781933527475)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2011
Turtle Point Press
€18.49
Available for download
Person
David Trinidad (born 1953) is an American poet. Trinidad was born in Los Angeles, California. In the early 1980s, he was one of a group of poets who were active at the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California. Other members of this group included Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, and Amy Gerstler. As editor of Sherwood Press, he published books by Cooper, Flanagan, Gerstler, Tim Dlugos, Alice Notley, and others. In 1988, Trinidad relocated to New York City. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in 1990. He taught at Rutgers University, the New School, and Princeton University. His collection PLASTICVILLE (2000) was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. In 2002, Trinidad moved to Chicago to teach at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-founded the literary journal Court Green. In addition to his own books of poetry, Trinidad has edited A FAST LIFE: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TIM DLUGOS (Nightboat Books, 2011) and the earlier selected Powerless (Serpent's Tail, 1995), Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (with Maxine Scates, 2001), and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (with Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, 2007). Trinidad's personal papers are archived at the Fales Library at New York University.