Mine is a Community of Misfits & Outlaws

Mine is Community of Misfits and Outlaws. These are poems, infused with the raw energy and wonderment of a writer for whom regards poetry is a force for social transformation. The poems are organized into two collections - the first, The Tenderloin Poems are a celebration and defense of the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. A vibrant mosaic of ethnicities, languages, faiths, and complexions and one last enclaves of poor and working-class people in the City. The second collection the Long Twilight is a geography of myth, history, and memory in which the personal is intertwined with the cultural and political developments of this country. These poems skip around early childhood events; sweep through the flowering of identity; the origins of political consciousness; and the poet's discovery of the body. Here there are poems of darker time - life in wilderness of urban America during the AIDS epidemic. These are followed by poems grappling with living in this period of environmental degradation and its unpromising consequences.