Diane Wakoski Boeken

Diane Wakoski's new and selected volume features "Greed: Part 14" alongside poems reflecting her deep exploration of food and drink as sources of beauty. The collection reveals her journey from a Western beach girl to a complex Medusa figure, addressing themes of aging and Midwestern life. With clarity and substance, Wakoski contemplates personal and cultural memories, intertwining vivid imagery of everyday experiences with profound reflections on purity and existence. Her work invites readers to appreciate the artistry found in the mundane.

In 1971, Diane Wakoski published The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems to tremendous acclaim when she was just thirty-three years old. In the decades that followed, she wrote additional "betrayal" poems, which are now collected here in one volume for the first time. Relevant, moving--at times shocking--it is Wakoski's honesty and bravery as an artist that continues to astonish, delight, inspire, and liberate readers. Wakoski responds to betrayal in a variety of ways including fantasies such as drilling bullet holes into the bodies of unfaithful lovers. But even her anger can be winking, as in the book's sly dedication to "all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks." There is joy here because it is self-knowledge that the writer seeks, as in the collection's title poem. Diane Wakoski's art as a confessional, storytelling poet has rarely been equaled. Her revelations become shared emotional truth with readers. The collection's new introduction by poet and Green Mountains Review editor Elizabeth Powell gives context to the long wake of Wakoski's inspiring influence on generations of readers. Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch is for anyone who ever lost a love and wishes to embrace the freedom, rather than the pain, it can bring