Becoming Human New Poems

This poetry is ... unabashed by sensuality and feeling, ... by insisting on the profound and writing it large and with intensity .... It is ... a voice beyond epoch and cultural baggage yet rooted in ... Los Angeles. Reading this collection made me challenge my prejudices against the personal/biographical in poetry. Here I had to re-learn that the world starts with your own heart, and the only question is one of scope .... The tour de force ... is the 'Dante in Los Angeles' sequence ... poems ...addressed to a ?woman of stone? ... poems of impossible love ... eternal yearning ... the holy folly of impossible love. And here he mingles the mountains, weathers, skies, seasons, stars of California with those of images of Hollywood divas who furnish the Aphrodite myths of the modern world ... these poems should send you out to buy and keep the book: More often we burn in false summers when winter winds press through our canyons from the desert: or Mexican rains drift north and drench us warmly until a storm from Alaska rolls down the green wave of the coast to clear the air with almost frozen rain and dress our mountains in white. Such tumults should distract me from my private Monroe or Harlow or Stone, but hot cold wet arid, these polar reversals echo my own moods as I pursue this woman who doesn't care if I am false or true.(From 'Marble?) Judy Gahagan, AMBIT 168, Spring 2002Lee, Lance is the author of 'Becoming Human New Poems' with ISBN 9780595188789 and ISBN 0595188788.