"squinting in California sunlight": David Trinidad's Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems now available!

As a totally biased former student of David's, I come here to tell you that this book is a BIG DEAL!  More than with a lot of new & selecteds, these poems are going to give you a sense of a full, deeply-perceived, playful, impassioned life. And there'll be plenty of poetry gossip, too!

“This magnum opus confirms David Trinidad's place in the poetic firmament: he is simply the best we have. A worthy successor to James Schuyler, Trinidad writes soulfully and sometimes photorealistically about the melancholy threshold where dolls and stars become inner objects -- dirty, glamorous, destructible. Jacqueline Susann meets Sei Shonagon? Trinidad manages to combine neo-formalist abstraction with dripping, gorgeous figuration: Bonnard's wet dream.” — Wayne Koestenbaum

 “This is a volume celebratory in tone, panoramic in scope, funny and genuinely moving. Trinidad is at the center of what's relevant in his art. And this collection is more vital and more enjoyable than any single performance he has given thus far.” — D.A. Powell

 “...Trinidad attends to the present to see into the past with such needle fine precision it's like encountering a perfectly appointed movie set where personal memory crosses intimately with cultural memory. Poetic form in Trinidad's hands is a metaphor for staking a claim on the material world even as it slips away in a shimmery Hollywood dissolve – a desperate, doomed reclamation of all that can never be held long enough.” — Robyn Schiff



PS. David's reading at the Poetry Project at the end of the month with Anselm Berrigan.

PPS. "Evening Twilight" was the Verse Daily poem for September 9, 2011.

PPPS. Here's a great DT poem that Hanna chose for poets.org:

9773 Comanche Ave.
by David Trinidad
In color photographs, my childhood house looks fresh as an uncut sheet cake— pale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trim squeezed from the grooved tip of a pastry tube. Whose dream was this confection? This suburb of identical, pillow-mint homes? The sky, too, is pastel. Children roller skate down the new sidewalk. Fathers stake young trees. Mothers plan baby showers and Tupperware parties. The Avon Lady treks door to door. Six or seven years old, I stand on the front porch, hand on the decorative cast-iron trellis that frames it, squinting in California sunlight, striped short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck. I sit in the backyard (this picture's black-and-white), my Flintstones playset spread out on the grass. I arrange each plastic character, each dinosaur, each palm tree and round "granite" house. Half a century later, I barely recognize it when I search the address on Google Maps and, via "Street view," find myself face to face— foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted a drab brown. I click to zoom: light hits one of the windows. I can almost see what's inside.