The Release of “be/trouble” by bridgette bianca
by Brian Dunlap
DJ spinned records. Conversations rose and intermingled in the air. “be/trouble” by bridgette bianca rested on a card table near Writ Large Press’ Peter Woods. The lady of the evening, professor and poet bridgette bianca stood, by the entrance greeting attendees as they arrived. Some already found this night so necessary, they needed their book signed before the evening began.
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The door of Los Angeles’ newest bookstore is propped open on a quiet section of Hollywood Boulevard, the front window displaying books on a handmade wooden bookshelf. Inside the front room, you’ll find more books and merchandise below a neon light thought bubble and a sign that reads, “I still haven’t figured out all the people I am.” The staff is friendly, warm and eager to listen. In the back room, separated by curtains, art hangs on the yellow walls. The large space is waiting to be used by Not a Cult, an independent publisher turned bookstore.
Author and former Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez says he’s been visiting California’s prisons for more than 40 years since leaving his own gang youth behind and losing 25 friends to drugs and street violence.
Most mornings, poet, memoirist and essayist Luis J. Rodriguez gets up around 5 a.m. at his San Fernando Valley home, reads for a few minutes for inspiration and then quickly goes to his computer to start writing. “I read, and then it’s, hey, man, I’ve got to do something!” he says. “If I can get a couple of hours in the morning, then I’m happy.”
Long before Jeanine Cummins’ highly contentious “American Dirt” was published by Flatiron Books, the novel was raising red flags internally, according to Myriam Gurba.
On any given day, you might find Susan Straight walking along the Santa Ana River or throwing darts at the local Elks lodge.
Virtual Velocity by Anthony Mora is the story of the curious creation of pop phenomena, Jake Jenkins, America’s most renowned and successful literary novelist. Spanning six decades, through three interconnected stories, Virtual Velocity follows Jake from a sixteen-year-old learning about literature and women, to frenetic rock journalist, to struggling literary novelist, to world-famous author. Journeying through L.Á.’s rock and literary worlds, it is also an homage to the city, tracking its internal and external changing landscape and its cultural shape shifting.
For our fifteenth annual look at debut poetry, we chose ten poets whose first books struck us with their formal imagination, distinctive language, and deep attention to the world. The books, all published in 2019, inhabit a range of poetic modes. There is Keith S. Wilson’s reimagining of traditional forms in Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, and Maya Phillips’s modern epic, Erou. There is Maya C. Popa’s lyric investigations in American Faith, Marwa Helal’s subversive documentary poems in Invasive species, and Yanyi’s series of prose poems in The Year of Blue Water. The ten collections clarify and play with all kinds of language—the language of the news, of love, of politics, of philosophy, of family, of place—and, as Popa says, they “slow and suspend the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly.”
Los Angeles Literature 