Terry Wolverton – författare

"Cuadros died of AIDS in 1996, two years after chronicling the disease in City of God, a book of poems and stories about queer Los Angeles. His belated follow-up takes the same form, with the same bracing urgency."—The New York Times "Without doubt one of the sexiest and most important writers I've ever read."—Justin Torres, author of Blackouts"My Body Is Paper is a testament to the unrelenting literary magic of Gil Cuadros. Through poetry and prose, Cuadros holds a mirror up to California, reflecting this land of dualities back at us. He gives us sunshine and sickness, ecstasy and drudgery, eros and death. I am so very grateful for his work."—Myriam Gurba, author of Creep: Accusations and ConfessionsSince City of God (1994) by Gil Cuadros was published 30 years ago, it has become an unlikely classic (an "essential book of Los Angeles" according to the LA Times), touching readers and writers who find in his work a singular evocation of Chicanx life in Los Angeles during and leading up to the AIDS epidemic, which took his life in 1996. Little did we know, Cuadros continued writing exuberant prose and poems in the period between his one published book and his untimely death at the age of 34. This recently discovered treasure, My Body Is Paper, is a stunning portrait of sex, family, religion, culture of origin, and the betrayals of the body. Tender and blistering, erotic and spiritual—Cuadros dives into these complexities which we grapple with today, showing us how to survive these times, and beyond.

“Like the mystery bruise of the title poem, these memento mori are livid imprints left behind by collisions with life, tattooed reminders of emotional confrontations. But Terry Wolverton is a survivor of her deep passions. Her heart beats on despite its contusions and pulses underneath the corpus of her experience like a wellspring of life under the painful intimations of mortality. This is a remarkable body of work.”—Michael Lassell, author of A Flame for the Touch That Matters“Terry Wolverton’s passionate achievement crackles with unsparing revelations from the dark side of the American Dream—epidemics, urban unrest, and a girlhood which might have been conjured in the imagination of Norman Rockwell’s diabolical twin. Into this end-of-the-century landscape, peopled by casualties, survivors, and warriors, she direcfts the manifold redeeming powers of poetry: to bear witness, to exorcise, to shore up—and hold fast among us—memories of those lost.”—Suzanne Lummis, author of In Danger“In Mystery Bruise, poems of loss and troubled adolescence give way to songs of healing and self-assertiveness. Terry Wolverton looks us straight in the eye, channels raw experience into lean columns, staunch forms. Her poems sting with the truth, the toxic times we live in, yet offer hope, instruct us how to reshape who we are.”—David Trinidad, author of Answer Song

What happens when one hundred poets from across the country all follow the same “recipe” for creating a poem? If you think the result is one hundred identical poems, then you haven’t seen Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies, an anthology edited by Terry Wolverton from Red Hen Press.The collection includes nationally recognized poets such as Michael Waters and Richard Garcia, Los Angeles notables such as Alicia Vogl Saenz and Jim Natal, poets from Canada, Mexico, and India, and a twelve-year-old and eight-year-old—all writing in response to the same set of instructions. The “recipe,” called the Twenty Little Poetry Projects, was devised by poet Jim Simmerman and first made its nationwide debut in The Practice of Poetry, a 1992 collection edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twitchell. Simmerman devised the exercise, he says, to encourage his poetry students to explore “free-for-all wackiness, inventive play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.”“Too many poems,” asserts Terry Wolverton, “suffer for their earnestness, an overabundance of sincerity, which sometimes means you tell the reader what they already know. A good poem shows the reader something new, and to do that, sometimes the poet needs to think differently.” Wolverton, an instructor of creative writing herself and founder of Writers At Work, a writing center in Los Angeles, has long used the Twenty Little Poetry Projects herself to “disrupt whatever habits one may be in with regard to writing poems.” The result is a poem in which “the journey to arrive at the content is unexpected, entertaining, and provocative.” She predicts that students will have a great time with the book, which will demonstrate that “poems can be playful and serious at the same time.”

When a woman breaks all the rules, she is often punished. In the case of Marie Girard, whose transgressions include prostitution, unwed motherhood, divorce and setting fire to her home, punishment includes ex-communication from the Catholic Church, incarceration in mental institutions and electroshock therapy.In this novel in poems, author Terry Wolverton suggests that the social institutions--the family, the Church, the medical establishment--that were supposed to protect Marie instead failed her. She contrasts the society into which Marie was born--early-Twentieth Century Detroit--with the culture of the Wendat Indians who'd lived in the same region hundreds of years earlier; the Wendat believed that madness was the result of "unfulfilled desires."In seventy-three vivid and lyrical poems, Embers contends that women's "bad" behavior may in fact be justifiable resistance against systems that exploit and endanger women.