| Thomas
Avena with a foreword by
Adrienne Rich |
DREAM OF ORDER |
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Thomas Avena, editor
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LIFE SENTENCES Writers, Artists, and AIDS |
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DREAM OF
ORDER
LOW
/ OUT OF STOCK |
DREAM OF ORDER
“Original, passionately wrought as to craft, sensual and delicate, un-selfish in a profound way.... Integrity saturates the texture of these poems.”
“Rendering memory and bearing witness through an often clinical eye, [Avena] investigates the intersections between death, art, and the emotional landscape of someone who has had more than his share of grief.... His poetry hints at the paradoxical ambivalences in our lives, their derangement and dissipation, leaving a clarity born of dimunution. This is an ambitious book, with a compassionate intelligence much in evidence.”
“Like Camus in The Plague, Avena concludes that an instinct for survival prevails over ‘the body’s slow rupture.’ These poems — illuminated bodies — leave a vivid image on the retina.”
Dream of Order brings together the previously uncollected poems of Thomas Avena. In these carefully constructed works, language is both pared down and evocative — a body thinned to expose its muscle and bones. Their depictions of urban claustrophobia, and of nature's healing and ravaging powers, form a tableau on which contemporary life and death are played out.
This powerful debut collection, from which a poem was selected for Best
American Poetry 1996, won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature
as a work in progress.
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LIFE SENTENCES
LOW
/ OUT OF STOCK |
LIFE SENTENCES: Writers, Artists, and AIDS
BEFORE COLUMBUS AMERICAN BOOK AWARD, 1995; SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR'S MEDAL, 1995
Moving, uncompromising literary works by leading writers and artists affected by AIDS.
“A grim, marvelous arrangement of sentences on the subject of life, death, and the latest blow the sky-god has dealt the human race — one feels compassion; best of all, passion and a need to act now.”
“This collection of highly articulate voices talking of AIDS out of intimate knowledge of the disease is painful but required reading.”
Since antiquity, art has concerned itself with the central issues of mortality, sexuality, and the relationship of survival to the artistic imperative and to the larger concerns of living. Life Sentences develops these themes within the context of AIDS. In this collection of new and powerful memoirs, poems, and interviews, critically acclaimed writers and artists (most of whom are HIV positive) incorporate their intensely personal experiences with AIDS into their art.
Contributors include: William Dickey, Diamanda Galás, Thom Gunn, Essex
Hemphill, Bo Huston, Tony Kushner, Marlon Riggs, Severo Sarduy, Edmund
White, and more.
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THOMAS AVENA (1959–2005) was the recipient of a 1995 American Book Award for editing and co-writing Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS. He was the editor for “Project Face to Face,” an AIDS oral history and arts installation, and served as the project's writer-in-residence during its exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Experimental Gallery in 1991. Known for his work on issues of treatment advocacy, he addressed the National Institutes of Health and the Zurich AIDS Congress. He was the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature and the International Humanitas Award for his work in AIDS education and the arts. He was also the author, with Adam Klein, of Jerome: After the Pageant (Bastard Books/D.A.P.), an exploration of the life and work of the painter Jerome Caja. Mr. Avena's work has also appeared in The American Poetry Review and Best American Poetry 1996. Thomas died on August 3, 2005, after a twenty-year battle with AIDS. | ||