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Weep Not, My Wanton

Name: Weep Not, My Wanton
Author: Maggie J. Dubris
ISBN: 9781574231809

by Maggie J. Dubris

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Overview

It was August in New York City and everyone who had money had fled for places with trees and wind. We had no air conditioning in the ambulance, only a pile of sheets on the floor to absorb the heat from the engine. My partner Vince sat in the passenger seat, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, a white towel tucked around his massive neck. Vince ran betting sheets for the entire hospital. The early part of our shift always consisted of collecting the yellow slips of paper before the totals were due. I drove east on Forty-second Street as he sorted them into piles, rolling past Peepland, Loveland, GirlWorld, the bright pink and green lights of the Deuce which the cops all call The Douche, swirling with every bit of filth washed in from the center of our country. Out one window was a video store where an old man died in the booth fucking a blow-up doll, out the other the all male follies with its weekend bouquet of razor wielding queens.
— Dream Book

Synopsis

The last book to be published by John Martin s legendary Black Sparrow Press, Weep Not, My Wanton consists of eight short stories; an award-winning 50 page prose-poem WillieWorld, based on the author s experience as a 911 paramedic in New York City during the 1980s; and Toilers of the Sea, a 70 page series of linked poems concerning extinction, comic books, and the nature of time.

1199 News

Throughout the book we accompany all kinds of characters through the everyday fusion of tragedy and comedy that is life in New York City: with a rookie EMT on her first day of work, into a hotel where a drug-addicted mother has just given birth to a doomed infant, or on rounds with a pair of seasoned paramedics who pick up and treat the same cast of regulars for the same afflictions (real or imagined) day after day.

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Editorials

Tom Clark

Thus begins the opening story in this arresting first Black Sparrow collection of the writings of Maggie Dubris, whose clear-eyed, unsentimental tales of her experiences as a paramedic in Hell's Kitchen offer a twentieth century rendition of the Inferno, deprived of Dantesque moral theologies. If the illusion of any sort of redemption fails to dawn over Dubris' endarkened urban landscape of ambulance emergencies and personal crises, a shadow of mortality continually pervades, along with the echoes of public trauma reverberating through a private life that veers towards the wild side. These poems and stories locate the aching truths of late capitalist society in the wounds of its victims, whores, crackheads, vagrants, suicides. "Seeing dead bodies no longer affects me, but from time to time I am strangely moved by objects in the apartments of people whom I have pronounced dead." Weep Not, My Wanton is a book of chilling discoveries.
— Black Sparrow Catalog

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Ammiel Alcalay

n this stunning debut, [WillieWorld] Maggie Dubris creates a fabric in which words are tied to the world, to the elusive fate of people exposed to misery, evil, and tenderness of their own and others' making. This world--and the eerie and eloquent poetry, prose, and prose-poetry generating it--corresponds more to writing emerging from situations of enormous urgency (the Beirut of Etel Adnan . . . the Istanbul shanties of Latife Tekin . . .) than anything American that comes to mind.
— Poetry Project Newsletter

B N. Hudspith

Maggie Dubris is one of the best lyrical poets writing today. . . What will catch you off guard is how someone can write like that and be grounded in the gritty urban reality of working as an EMS medic in Times Square, New York, which she does.
— Poetz.com