Janine Pommy Vega

Softcover, 144 pages ISBN 1-57423-207-X $18.95   The Green Piano: New Poems by Janine Pommy Vega Click here for an online preview of The Green Piano “Honest, passionate, and exhilarating, Janine Pommy Vega brings her own voice to the Beat pilgrimage. She is changed by her journey through the world, and she changes the world through her words.” ––American Book Review In this, her first collection since the career-spanning Mad Dogs of Trieste (2000), Janine Pommy Vega writes with quiet command of her life and times and of our shared American present. Here are protests against the depravities of the prison system and the Washington war machine––political poems that are fierce yet never strident and that always begin in closely observed human particulars. Here too are tender lyrics about family, lovers, and friends; celebrations of the natural and domestic worlds of upstate New York; and remarkably vivid letters home from spiritual sojourns through Italy, Germany, and the former Yugoslavia. “Vega’s poems reflect a deeply felt and aching knowledge,” wrote Publishers Weekly of her previous collection. “They ‘go’ (as Kerouac said) their own patient, unadorned, and dignified way.”     Softcover, 276 pages ISBN: 1-57423-126-x 1978 $17.95 Hardcover, 276 pages ISBN: 1-57423-127-8 $31.95   Mad Dogs of Trieste New & Selected Poems, 1975–2000 by Janine Pommy Vega “In Vega’s poetry there is a living language, a living human being. . . . She goes to many places [and], like Henry Miller, always ‘tears off a piece.’ ” ––Jennifer Stone, KPFA FM Janine Pommy Vega is the archetypal New York Beat. Her poetry is intelligent and politically aware, and her performances––in English and in Spanish, with and without music––are intense, incantatory. Her writings are also intensely autobiographical, following closely in the footsteps of her life-journey: they are the poetic record of her experience-hungry travels through the world and her spiritual retreats into herself; her work with public schoolchildren and delinquent youth, and with the inmates and staff of the New York State prison system; her friendships and her love affairs, her farewells and her lingering memories. For this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing. The result is “an honest and passionate road map to her soul,” said the American Book Review, “a book describing one poet’s life as a pilgrimage toward herself. It is an exhilarating trip.”