Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Hagedorn muses about love and sex, and probes with wry humor and sharp social satire the heart—and hearbreaks—of the immigrant experience.
"Jessica Hagedorn is one of the best of a new generation of writers who are making American language new and who in the process are creating a new American Literature."—Russell Banks
"[Hagedorn] sees her native land from both near and far, with ambivalent love, the only kind of love worth writing about."—John Updike
Jessica Hagedorn is a performance artist, poet, playwright, and formerly a commentator on NPR. Her novel, Dogeaters, won an American Book Award. Other books include the groundbreaking Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and The Gangster of Love.
A provocative collection of poetry and prose from the acclaimed author of Dogeaters. In the poems of Dangerous Music, Hagedorn celebrates music. Pet Food & Tropical Apparitions includes poems, stories, and a novella. The final section of the collection consists of previously unpublished prose and poetry.
Synopsis
Drawn from the essence of Latin soul and free jazz, rich evocations of the author's ancestral roots.
Publishers Weekly
In the grassroots tradition of her "satin sisters" Thulani Davis and Ntozake Shange, Hagedorn's latest book collects work written during her Bay Area sojourn in the early '70s (poems first published by Kenneth Rexroth to whom the book is dedicated) all the way to post-Septmeber 11 entries in her "New York Diary." Along the way, we encounter texts written for the page as well as the stage, the boundaries between verse and prose often traversed and blurred. As a Filipina-American, Hagedorn reminds us from the start that "There is a border/ One cannot cross/ Although the guards are not visible." Such rallying cries seem to come right out of the feminist politics of an Adrienne Rich, but add to that the street-smart culture of the Tenderloin and the riffs of North Beach jazz and you get some hauntingly jaunty rhythms: "born from the mouth of a tree/ the lullaby of joe loco/ and mongo/ turquoise eye/ the lullaby of patti labelle/ and the bluebells / flowers of her smile." While the collection is uneven, read as a sort of artistic diary (rather than a set of highly polished art objects) it is often quite moving, taking readers through the turns of a restless mind, "a fighter/ who confronts/ destiny." (May) Forecast: Hagedorn's 1990 novel, Dogeaters, won an American Book Award, was an NBA finalist and was the Before Columbus Foundation's Book of the Year; Hagedorn's theatrical adaptation of the book recently premiered at the Joseph Papp/Public Theater New York Shakespeare Festival. Sales should be strong as this well-produced book should reach fans of her fiction, and the performance and poetry circuits already know Hagedorn's work well. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.