Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems

Although Trinidad now lives in Chicago, he is best known as a 1980s Los Angeles poet (working alongside Dennis Cooper and Amy Gerstler) who moved to New York at the height of the AIDS crisis (occasionally registering its toll) and refined a version of James Schuyler’s singular dailiness while indulging pop obsessions. The poems are a pleasure to read: anyone who loves Schuyler, cats, Barbie, or Heddy LaMarr can flip to nearly any page and find sparkling observations. The poems of domestic bliss with Ira, Trinidad’s former partner, form a diaristic bloc that reads like a postcard version of the New York School. The poems chronicling the lives and rivalries of his peers (including Tim Dlugos), along with their relationships with poetic luminaries like Schuyler, form an important poetic record. And the poems of sex with strangers, and others, capture real immediacies. The 125 pages of new poems that open the volume are largely valedictory looks back: “So I’m in the frozen food aisle/ at Jewel, trying to find the right/ veggie burger, and I realize/ “Blitzkrieg Bop” is playing on/ the store’s P.A. Thirty years later:/ the Ramones as Muzak? Hard to Believe.” (Sept.)