Bøger af Terry Wolverton

"Why are not my arms outstretched to greet the day, instead of my jaw clenched to withstand it? Why the heart curled into fist of dread?" asks author Terry Wolverton in this collection of 49 lyric essays. WOUNDED WORLD: LYRIC ESSAYS ABOUT OUR SPIRITUAL DISQUIET that explores how what we think of as our social problems are really spiritual problems and poses prayers, practices and perspectives to begin to remedy them.

Do we truly know the ones we love or do we invent them, turning them into fictions, projections of our own desires? When a chance car accident sends author Bryn Redding into a deep coma, a whole luminous life is eclipsed, plunged into a state of darkness. The only glimmers that remain appear through the perceptions of those who love her, but contradictions between these views render them suspect. These images of Bryn conflict acutely for Djuna, Bryn's lover of four years, and Vera, Bryn's mother. Gathered at her hospital bedside, each stakes a claim to Bryn's identity, her past and future. Who is Bryn Redding? Is she the difficult, angry girl her mother remembers, or the vibrant iconoclast her lover adores? To Vera, it seems the child she once thought she knew has grown into a stranger, someone she can scarcely recognize. For Djuna, the possibility of loss moves her to cling even more ferociously to her idealized vision of Bryn. As friends from the present and past-the community Bryn has built to supplant her family of origin-gather at her side, a many-faceted picture emerges of a woman whose inner life is a mystery. When one of these friends presents Vera with copies of Bryn's published works, Vera comes to understand that her memories of the past contrast irreconcilably with her daughter's. Bryn's tough, spare writing provides yet another picture of Bryn Redding, the manufactured layers of personae and the history that lurks beneath, all the while cautioning the reader that fiction is never a reliable mirror of reality. As Bryn hovers between life and death, the antagonism between Vera and Djuna ebbs, each coming to recognize that the Bryn of their imaginations will never be restored to them, and that her recovery, if achieved at all, will yield further mysteries. BAILEY'S BEADS is a beautifully written, perceptive and sexy novel that explores the very nature of identity and the possibility of ever really knowing another person.

Terry Wolverton is the author of nine books, including novels, memoir, and poetry. BREATH AND OTHER STORIES is the first time her short fiction, written over the past two decades, has been collected in one volume. In "Breath," a mother wrestles with how much freedom for her daughter might be too much. In "Sex Less," a lesbian contemplates her waning desire and what impact this might have on her identity. In "A Whisper in the Veins," a man attempts to tell his mother he's been diagnosed with AIDS. In "News," a woman's life is taken over by her preoccupation with the headlines. The characters in Wolverton's short fiction speak to us about their inner lives in ways that are unforgettable.

Some of Los Angeles' most exciting poets use a collaborative process to create new works, including Elena Karina Byrne, Sesshu Foster, Ramón Garcia, Douglas Kearney and Terry Wolverton.

Maggie Seaver is attempting to make peace with losing custody of her daughter, Angel, in the wake of a break-up with the girl's biological mother, Yoli. But when she receives evidence that Angel has been abused, Maggie kidnaps the child, drives across the border into Baja, and ends up in a spiritual commune outside the southern Baja town of Todos Santos. During the long drive down the Baja penninsula, and especially during her sojourn in the spiritual community of the Light Beings, Maggie must contend not only with the fear of being apprehended by the police, but also question the degree to which her actions are fueled by concern for her daughter or by the desire for revenge against Yoli. The ailing spiritual leader of the community provides lessons in forgiveness and redemption that will affect a profound change in each of the characters.

New York performance artist Gwen Kubacky thinks no one cares about feminist art anymore, until young art student Emma Firestein approaches her to become a mentor. Gwen agrees, hoping this legacy can be passed on to a new generation. As it happens Emma's mother, Dana Firestein, is a woman who co-founded a legendary radical feminist school in the 1970s--Labrys--which Gwen attended. Gwen's tutelage of Emma has barely begun when the young woman is raped and murdered during a night out clubbing. Dana's comrades rally from far and near, as do friends of Emma's, and they gather in the only possible space, Gwen's warehouse loft. The young women disdain the judgmental old fossils they're cooped up with. And to the women of Labrys, this alien new generation, with its ignorance of its radical roots and birth in feminism, appears ungrateful if not worthless. But heretical challenges to old beliefs surface among Dana's contemporaries, as do truths long held secret. And among the younger women are those who possess more than enough rage and radical belief to take action to avenge Emma's murder.

When a woman breaks all the rules, she is often punished. In the case of Marie Girard, whose transgressions include prostitution, unwed motherhood, divorce and setting fire to her home, punishment includes ex-communication from the Catholic Church, incarceration in mental institutions and electroshock therapy.In this novel in poems, author Terry Wolverton suggests that the social institutions--the family, the Church, the medical establishment--that were supposed to protect Marie instead failed her. She contrasts the society into which Marie was born--early-Twentieth Century Detroit--with the culture of the Wendat Indians who'd lived in the same region hundreds of years earlier; the Wendat believed that madness was the result of "unfulfilled desires."In seventy-three vivid and lyrical poems, Embers contends that women's "bad" behavior may in fact be justifiable resistance against systems that exploit and endanger women.

What happens when one hundred poets from across the country all follow the same ¿recipe¿ for creating a poem? If you think the result is one hundred identical poems, then you haven¿t seen Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies, an anthology edited by Terry Wolverton from Red Hen Press.The collection includes nationally recognized poets such as Michael Waters and Richard Garcia, Los Angeles notables such as Alicia Vogl Saenz and Jim Natal, poets from Canada, Mexico, and India, and a twelve-year-old and eight-year-old¿all writing in response to the same set of instructions. The ¿recipe,¿ called the Twenty Little Poetry Projects, was devised by poet Jim Simmerman and first made its nationwide debut in The Practice of Poetry, a 1992 collection edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twitchell. Simmerman devised the exercise, he says, to encourage his poetry students to explore ¿free-for-all wackiness, inventive play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.¿¿Too many poems,¿ asserts Terry Wolverton, ¿suffer for their earnestness, an overabundance of sincerity, which sometimes means you tell the reader what they already know. A good poem shows the reader something new, and to do that, sometimes the poet needs to think differently.¿ Wolverton, an instructor of creative writing herself and founder of Writers At Work, a writing center in Los Angeles, has long used the Twenty Little Poetry Projects herself to ¿disrupt whatever habits one may be in with regard to writing poems.¿ The result is a poem in which ¿the journey to arrive at the content is unexpected, entertaining, and provocative.¿ She predicts that students will have a great time with the book, which will demonstrate that ¿poems can be playful and serious at the same time.¿

¿Like the mystery bruise of the title poem, these memento mori are livid imprints left behind by collisions with life, tattooed reminders of emotional confrontations. But Terry Wolverton is a survivor of her deep passions. Her heart beats on despite its contusions and pulses underneath the corpus of her experience like a wellspring of life under the painful intimations of mortality. This is a remarkable body of work.¿¿Michael Lassell, author of A Flame for the Touch That Matters¿Terry Wolverton¿s passionate achievement crackles with unsparing revelations from the dark side of the American Dream¿epidemics, urban unrest, and a girlhood which might have been conjured in the imagination of Norman Rockwell¿s diabolical twin. Into this end-of-the-century landscape, peopled by casualties, survivors, and warriors, she direcfts the manifold redeeming powers of poetry: to bear witness, to exorcise, to shore up¿and hold fast among us¿memories of those lost.¿¿Suzanne Lummis, author of In Danger¿In Mystery Bruise, poems of loss and troubled adolescence give way to songs of healing and self-assertiveness. Terry Wolverton looks us straight in the eye, channels raw experience into lean columns, staunch forms. Her poems sting with the truth, the toxic times we live in, yet offer hope, instruct us how to reshape who we are.¿¿David Trinidad, author of Answer Song