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Gas Station
As Jimi Hendrix and Vietnam rumble on in the background, an Italian-American teenage boy grows up working in his dad's gas station in Massachusetts. In a world full of rear end fluid, floor jacks and leaky gaskets, the narrator is awkward with his father and not too hot at mounting snow tires or dismantling engines. Poetic, poignant, and beautifully observed -- the grease and grime of the gas station, the rhythms of work and talk, are detailed with such precision that the locality becomes universal -- Joseph Torra has written an extraordinary and superb coming-of-age novel in the great American blue-collar tradition, and one which has echoes of another working-class son of Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac.
Selected Poems
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Call Me Waiter
Fiction. CALL ME WAITER is a memoir, with a few liberties taken, of poet and novelist Joseph Torra's twenty years as a waiter and "working the stick" (bartending) in and around Boston. Restaurant work was Torra's night job affording him the time to write his poems (Keeping Watching the Sky, After the Chinese) and his My Ground trilogy of novels. There are no celebrity chefs in Torra's book but plenty of adventures inside the kitchen, out on the restaurant floor and behind the bar. It is a book about one man's world of work. Now Torra can write Call Me Writer.
Who Do You Think You Are?
In Who Do You Think You Are? Reflections Of A Writer's Life, Joseph Torra, ponders his thirty plus years as a poet, novelist, editor, publisher, and teacher. With both pathos and humor, Torra discusses the challenges he has faced as an author, husband, parent-and, as a person who struggles with bipolar disease. He shares stories and insights on: growing up in a working class Italian-American Boston suburb, literary and other artists who have influenced him, painting, music, addiction, the publishing scene-past and present-as well as the importance of mentorships and community. Who Do You Think You Are?, a courageous and frank portrait of an author, benefits all readers who hope to pursue an artistic career of any form. "Torra's characters speak in an almost poetic cadence," said Boston Magazine. And Charlotte Innes of the Los Angeles Times wrote, Torra "Offers an intricate, sympathetic, sometimes outraged, always graceful commentary on the larger world."
Yours Presently
Boston born and bred, John Wieners was a queer self-styled poète maudit who was renowned among his contemporaries but ignored by mainstream critics. Twenty-first-century readers are correcting this elision, placing Wieners back alongside his better-known peers, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Amiri Baraka. Wieners was a voluble letter writer, maintaining friendships with these contemporaries that spanned decades and tackling a range of complex issues that resonate today, including drug use, homosexuality, subcultures of the East and West Coasts, and the differing treatment of mental patients based on their economic class. The letters collected in this volume are greatly enhanced by Eileen Myles’s preface and Stewart’s thorough introduction, notes, and brief bios of the poets, writers, artists, and editors with whom Wieners corresponded. The result is more than the letters of a poet—it is a history that explores the world at large in the mid-twentieth century.
The Making of a Marxist Philosopher
The Making of a Marxist Philosopher is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from renowned Marxist philosopher Sean Sayers. His father was the son of a Jewish-Irish businessman who was a friend of Michael Collins and other leaders in the Irish struggle for independence. He became a writer who was given his first job by T. S. Eliot, shared a flat with George Orwell, went to America and was blacklisted under McCarthyism. Sean’s mother was the American-born daughter of a world famous Italian American anarchist. She became a communist and lived and worked in China. Sean was born in New York and grew up in London. He studied philosophy in Cambridge and Oxford Universitie...
Notes to Make the Sound Come Right
In “When Malindy Sings” the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about the power of African American music, the “notes to make the sound come right.” In this book T. J. Anderson III, son of the brilliant composer, Thomas Anderson Jr., asserts that jazz became in the twentieth century not only a way of revising old musical forms, such as the spiritual and work song, but also a way of examining the African American social and cultural experience. He traces the growing history of jazz poetry and examines the work of four innovative and critically acclaimed African American poets whose work is informed by a jazz aesthetic: Stephen Jonas (1925?–1970) and the unjustly ...
Black Chant
A study of postmodernism and African-American poets.
Paratextual Communities
"Although interest in paratexts has been increasing, Paratextual Communities is the first book-length study of their role in contemporary American avant-garde poetry. Sixteen illustrations enhance this book."--BOOK JACKET.
Never by Itself Alone
Through its comprehensive history of post-war queer writing in Boston and San Francisco from the 1940s through the 21st century, Never By Itself Alone provides a new view of queer history. Grundy intertwines analysis of lesbian, gay, and queer literature of the time, centering voices which have not yet before been explored in existing criticism. The book elevates the underrepresented work of writers of color and those with gender-nonconforming identities, underscores the link between activism and literature, and insists upon the vital importance of radical accounts of race, class and gender in any queer studies worthy of the name
