Mine is a Community of Misfits & Outlaws

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Mine is Community of Misfits and Outlaws. </strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>These are poems infused with the raw energy and wonderment of a writer for whom regards </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>poetry is a force for social transformation</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>.  The poems are organized into two collections - the first </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)><em>The Tenderloin Poems </em>are a celebration and defense of the Tenderloin District of San Francisco</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>. A vibrant mosaic of ethnicities languages faiths and complexions and one last enclaves of poor and working-class people in the City. The second collection the Long Twilight is a geography of myth history and memory in which the personal is  intertwined with the cultural and political developments of this country. These poems skip around early childhood events; sweep through the flowering of identity; the origins of political consciousness; and the poet's discovery of the body. Here there are poems of darker time - </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>life in wilderness of urban America during the AIDS epidemic</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>. These are followed by </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>poems grappling with living in this period of environmental degradation and its unpromising consequences</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>.</span></p>