Before she became an award-winning novelist, Michelle Tea wrote poems about life, love, and heartbreak
"Hers is an art of emotions and direct statements, casual and harsh at once." -Publishers Weekly
"A wonderfully light and simultaneously deep collection... Her poetry speaks with a disciplined and passionate clarity." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Tea writes with a raw-hearted, wry but wide-eyed ebullience, rendering dyke bohemia with intense, gritty, glittering romanticism." -
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Before penning her contemporary classic novel, Valencia, Tea wrote wonderfully honest narrative poems, which she self-published in small editions, now collected here for the first time. These poems bring to life Tea's early experiences, from the challenging family home she left in Massachusetts, through college and Tucson sex work, to a more fulfilling existence in San Francisco, where queer activism includes risky affairs, alcohol and drug fueled adventures, and occasional self doubt. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Book Sense 76 pick.
A young stalwart of San Francisco's queer underground, a onetime "lesbian feminist radical activist prostitute," and a survivor of Boston's roughest neighborhoods, Tea has won plaudits with novels (the Lambda Award-winning Valencia) and a memoir (The Chelsea Whistle) which draw on her gritty experience. Her first success, though, came through the performance-poetry scene: Tea not only organized the famed SF Sister Split reading series but made a splash with her own readings and chapbooks in the mid-1990s. This expansive and fiery volume collects those chapbooks along with unpublished texts from those years, when Tea wrote (and performed) in-your-face work with a raw fanzine feel. "Listen, I come from pavement... here is my poetic apology," one says; another asks, "aren't all the poems/ a salvaged piece/ of something awful." Snappy sentences try hard to shock ("straight girls of America, I am lighting/ votive candles for your ignored and/ misused clitorises") while titles sometimes tell us what to expect ("On Learning My Lover Was a Whore And It's All Her Fault"). Tea's tough talk owes something to Nikki Giovanni, though older art works of any sort are kept at arm's length; instead, the poems make vivid Tea's own life, from the household she left in New England (with a leering father and a codependent mother) through college and the Tucson sex trade, to the happier life she made for herself on the West Coast, where queer activism does not rule out risky seductions, cigarettes and self-doubt. Hers is an art of emotions and direct statements, casual and harsh at once.
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