Psychosis in the Produce Department

by Laurel Ann Bogen

Overview

Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015 gathers the best work from Laurel Ann Bogen's previous ten books as well as new and unpublished poetry. Ranging in themes as diverse as horrific beauty and exquisite madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, life in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and growing up as a Baby Boomer, these poems offer sly, humorous, surreal—and most crucially, accessible—genre-busting work that can only be called Vintage Bogen. Readers are also given the unique opportunity to experience the full power of Bogen's critically acclaimed poetry performance through ten included QR codes that link to audio files of select poems in the collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099936
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/07/2016
Edition description:	1
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Despite an award-winning 30-year career, Laurel Ann Bogen—poet, performance artist, teacher, author of ten books including Washing a Language (Red Hen Press, 2004) and The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies (Red Wind Books, 1996)—might be mistaken for an overnight sensation. The arc of her writing career began during the 1970s, through years of harrowing confinement inside the back wards of psychiatric hospitals. She carved her way back to life through poetry and, along the way, has influenced decades of LA-based poets, students, lovers (and even non-lovers) of language with her unmistakable and unmistakably powerful voice. Bogen has taught in the UCLA Writer’s Extension Program since 1990 and is also a founding member of the celebrated poetry performance ensemble, Nearly Fatal Women. She lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

1970s

Cancer 19

Defectives 20

Driving to Laguna 24

I Coulda Been a Contender 25

Mary Magdalene Crosses the Delaware 27

Narrow Beds 32

Rat City 34

Statuary/Poem for My Girlhood 37

The Night Grows Teeth 38

The Red Pencil 40

Three Years Later I Still Send Anonymous Postcards to You 41

Travesty 43

27 Years of Madness 44

Union Station 48

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Laurel Ann Bogen's poems are lethal and smoking. If she is often painfully conscious at what we do to each other in the name of love, her poems are also rambunctious insignias of hope and courage. Psychosis in the Produce Department is an exuberant mix of human passions, a collection of poems that are at once mad with voltage and utterly sane. . . .a great pleasure to read."

—Steve Kowit

Editorial Reviews

Laurel Ann Bogen’s poems are lethal and smoking. If she is often painfully conscious at what we do to each other in the name of love, her poems are also rambunctious insignias of hope and courage. All of the Above is an exuberant mix of human passions, a collection of poems that are at once mad with voltage and utterly sane . . . a great pleasure to read.”
—Steve Kowit

From the Publisher