Drive - Softcover

Drive is Hettie Jones' first full collection of poems, following two earlier chapbooks. Her celebrated memoir of the Beat scene, HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES, is currently available in paperback, and she has published many books for children and young adults, including the award-winning BIG STAR FALLIN' MAMA and THE TREES STAND SHINING. A longtime editor and teacher, she is currently at Parsons School of Design, the 92nd Street Y, and Penn State University. She is Co-Chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and runs a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford hills. The mother of two grown daughters, Hettie Jones has lived for many years in Manhattan's East Village.

A well-respected writer/editor, it is now a pleasure to read Hettie Jones' first full collection of long awaited poems, written over the many years of her literary life. Though always with a "beat" perspective, rhythm...her language and tone revel in New Yorkese, especially "loiza," even when the poet is out of the city, driving American highways in a "green Geronimo."These poems contain a large dollop of tongue-in-cheek humor, a large slash of satire and numerous, acknowledgeable, chuckles. Though her good mind and sound ideas are often political, that is just fine. Surely serious, she rarely stoops to rhetoric. Jones is a little short on metaphor. Her astute and acute reference to her title, Drive, offers many differing ramifications and suggestions. Her various forms seem self-created and that's "beat." Still, for the most part these poems are brief and her best poems are ones that leave a clutch in the throat and offer a good read.These are poems from a sensible woman with tremendous, sometimes outrageous experience she is willing to share. A woman who can still throw gutter mud and laugh in the face of whatever adversity.Drive would appear a chronicle of one life fully lived and recorded, a life not without pain, but not void of pleasure and joy. These poems are for those who not only enjoy poetry but for those who have a hold on -- From Independent Publisher