To write about what it is like to grow up in a working-class commercial fishing family, work as a nontraditional laborer in the physical trades, labor in a marriage and then come out, emerge from the assumption of excellent health into the reality of chronic illness, return to school, become a writer and a teacher of writing - and through it all love the ones you love, be sustained by them - requires more than one voice, more than one form.
In The Rooms We Make Our Own, Toni Mirosevich does just this. She builds the complex structure of her lesbian experience section by section, constructing her life so that its framework is exposed for us to read. Poetry shares the space with fiction, "interrupting" each other as events in real life do.
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About the Author:
Toni Mirosevich is the Associate Director of the San Francisco State Poetry Center.
From Booklist:
Mirosevich's four-part collection of poetry and short prose evokes the ghosts of Gandhi, Betty Crocker, Hamlet's sad Ophelia, and Virginia Woolf, all joining the contemporary workforce approaching the second millennium. Madonna, not yet a ghost, is there, too--a small woman who drives a 35-foot trailer truck and is "scrutinized" by "trucker paparazzi" with "their mouths so open birds could build" in them. Other characters include Russian emigres who, no longer afraid, no longer whisper; a traveler to Arizona encountering a waitress-seer; and a woman who lost her Brittany spaniel to her ex-lover, whom she can forgive for cruelty, bad judgment, and ignorance but not for giving the dog away. A "lost dog" feeling pervades these portraits of anomic and truncated spirits striving for wholeness against overwhelming odds, both external and internal. Whitney Scott
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherFirebrand Books
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 156341080X
- ISBN 13 9781563410802
- BindingPaperback