Notes on a Past Life

Poetry. "In NOTES ON A PAST LIFE, David Trinidad exorcises the ghosts of New York with a compulsively readable, wrenching memoir in verse. His "Goodbye to All That" offers a critique of ambition, an ode to community, and a sip of the poison that poetry is, in the end, the antidote to."—Eula Biss "David Trinidad's poems in NOTES ON A PAST LIFE are breathy and breathtaking. Forgoing traditional formal gestures, these memoir-verses burst with energy, finding their own shapes. No one writes nostalgia like Trinidad. He chronicles friendships with poets and the influence of poets who came before. He chronicles a glorious love affair and its aftermath, bad jobs, art, ambition, fame, 9/11, AIDS, dreams, meals, real estate, ghosts, lyrical gossip, the slights that haunt us, and the hurts we rise above. NOTES ON A PAST LIFE is a mature, wise, and enlightening book."—Denise Duhamel "This reader was depressed by the rancorous settling of scores but exalted by the homage paid to the great dead—a record of lived life, every second of it, and a love letter to New York (a letter written after a disappointing but gripping affair)."—Edmund White "NOTES ON A PAST LIFE catalogs in "Trinidadian" detail an outsider's relationship to the insider world of New York City poetry—cutthroat parties, fragile egos, heartbreaking losses, as many endings as beginnings. Trinidad refuses the safe distance of "the speaker" in these autobiographical, intimate (sometimes searing) poems. This is a book for outsiders and insiders, for romantics and cynics. Some will be pissed. Some will be thrilled. And everyone will be "dishing" (as poets do) about this astonishing book, afraid to admit how much they love it."—Aaron Smith