If you're interested in pop culture pathos, 'Answer Song' is a must-have. Trinidad's style encompasses love, lust, sexuality & 60s kitsch. Ambitious, simple, & beautifully rendered.

David Trinidad is the answer to our prayers. His poems radiate with the fullness and intensity which gives hope to an overwrought world. May he continue to bring us these treasures for years to come. Buy it because everyone needs to hear this Answer Song!

Ann Stanford's poems are luminous with the landscapes of California, especially L.A. where she lived and worked as a writer and teacher for many years. The poems are also haunted by the encroachment of land developers as she observes and records the disappearance of those landscapes. She writes with an aching beauty of grape orchards, country roads, bouganvilla,nuthatches, hawks and horses. Her poems are straightforward meditations on loss, love, beauty, human nature and poetry. Here's an example from "Done With"

They are trampling the garden --/ My mother's lilac, my father's grapevine,/ The freesias, the jonquils, the grasses./ Hot asphalt goes down/ Over the torn stems and hardens.//

What will they do in springtime?/ Those blubs and stems groping upward/ That drown in earth under the paving,/ Thick with sap, pale in the dark/ As they try the unrolling of green.//

May they double themselves/ Pushing together up to the sunlight,/ May they break through the seal stretched above them/ Open and flower and cry we are living.//

This is a gorgeous book edited by two of her students. They have done her and us a great service in bringing these poems back into the light.

Some poems stretch the meaning of what a poem is. Others are simply not poetry. Plasticville contains poems of the second type. Trinidad seems obsessed with plastic and Barbie, but fails to do anything original or even clever with these themes. A few of these poems are just lists : Monster Mash, Of Mere Plastic, and In My Room. They appear to be poetry, but are just lists anyone could type up with their word processor centering the margin. A few, like the title piece Plasticville, Clue, and Directions, and are amusing, but there just aren't enough poems in this collection to make it worthwhile or memorable.

I was given a copy of this book as a Chirstmas gift. I had heard of Trinidad before, even read his last book Answer Song, a friend had it. Plasticville renewed my interest in reading poetry. The work is fresh, plain, clean -- and while Trinidad can sometimes be a rigid formalist the material lightens the load. Having become bored with much contemporary American poetry, Trinidad's Plasticville helped to renew my interest. From the pop-culture material to the more intimate, domestic stuff (written in the voice of his dog!), Trinidad's Plasticville is refreshing, well-written, and a pleasure to read. So smart, so engaging, I can't wait to read what he does next.

This is the one of the few books of poetry I've read that actually means something! Discovering this has really changed the way I think about verse and books in general. The best thing about it? NOT boring. I'm so sick of the innocuous, adjectival, over-written, meaningless poems in so many journals and "literary" magazines of our time. David Trinidad is smart--read for pure pleasure, and then read again and look for the subtle tricks and talent he employs to make these poems truly great art! Truly fresh, too. No one else is writing about our tarnished culture like Trinidad. He is truly unique, and like I said, the best compliment I can give is that this book is not a bore--something that 98% of all books of poetry these days are! Thank you Mr. Trinidad! You've got me reading and enjoying poetry again!