Where the words end and my body begins

April 15, 2015

Dawn's Vancouver Book Award-winning How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir and Lambda Literary Award-winning first novel, Sub Rosa, build naturally to this autobiographical first collection. In your face yet tightly, beautifully crafted, it uses the glosa, a 15th-century Spanish form, as it moves through hard-bitten high school years ("our after-school program was Alcoholics Anonymous"), depression, stripping and hustling, sex and sexuality, to tough love with tough women and a deep relationship with queer writers from Gertrude Stein to Adrienne Rich. A bravura performance--and insightful if scary reading for poetry lovers and more.

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