No One with a Past Is Safe by Page Dougherty
No One with a Past Is Safe is a stunning
debut from Page Dougherty. In quiet but powerful narratives, these poems
measure the pressure that history exerts on women's experience in ways
both close to and far from home. These poems announce the arrival of a
poet whose voice cannot be ignored.
"In a long-overdue debut volume that gives voice to the spiritual daughters of women in Dorothea Lange's photographs and that reveals the innate and abiding resiliency of such hardscrabble lives, Page Dougherty has crafted a poetry as personal as it is political, full of private sympathies and griefs as well as public reckonings. Like Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich, Dougherty raises her voice in praise of 'the solidarities of women,' in recognition of the 'sheer power in the bonds.' No One with a Past Is Safe speaks to us all with the urgency of an outsider whose fluency and vision might save us from ourselves. Here is one of those rare first books that augurs an indispensable body of work." --Michael Waters
"From Cincinnati's Word Press, No One With a Past Is Safe ($16) by Page Dougherty is a powerful collection of narrative poems that quietly champion women overcoming hardscrabble lives."--Dennis Loy Johnson, Moby Lives
Samples of Page Dougherty's poems
Page Dougherty's
poems have appeared widely in literary journals, and have earned her honors
including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Mid-Atlantic
States Arts Consortium Fellowship, and a NY State Council on the Arts
Writer in Residency. A community organizer in the coal fields of southern
West Virginia in the 1970s, she was active in the miners' wildcat strike
movement. Page Dougherty now lives in New York City, and teaches in the
City University of New York.
$16.00, 94 pages,
ISBN: 0-9708667-3-9
To order, send a check for $16 plus $5 shipping and handling to PO Box 541106, Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106. Make check payable to Word Press.