It is chilling and dreamy; horrifying, heartbreaking, and gorgeous. "It was just this constant desire. It was just this / this constant desire for anything / that moved across my field of vision. For anything / that moved. I was just this".

WillieWorld

Literature & Fiction

Dubris, Maggie

Poetry

CUZ Publications

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Afterword by Antonino D'Ambrosio. BROKEDOWN PALACE is Maggie Dubris's ode to St. Clare's, the Hell's Kitchen hospital where she worked as an EMT for more than 25 years, until it closed. She weaves together prose and verse, memory and reportage, documents and testimonies into an epic ride that takes in the crumbling Times Square of the 80s, the parade of odd characters that passed through, the ad hoc expedients demanded by a hospital without funds, and then the crushing onslaught of AIDS. Her book is absorbing, funny, lyrical, and transcendentally sad, a stunning poetic monument to a New York City that no longer exists

BrokeDown Palace

Subpress

When Orlie Breton shows up in June of 1979 to work as a paramedic in New York City’s 911 system, she finds herself plunged into a violent and magical world, populated by medics who are not terribly different from the homeless peoplethe "skels"who comprise most of their patient population. Orlie draws parallels between her experiences to the stories and feelings represented in the works of her favorite writers, including Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, and Mark Twain. Skels was written with the question in mind of what would happen if the ambulance world really was permeated with the works of past writers, and the skels were carrying the consciousnesses of the writers themselves. What would the protagonist have done if she had met the greatest poet of all, dirty and covered with lice, and been granted the chance to save him? Not from dying, but from his own life. With Skels Dubris shares what she saw during her own time as an EMT not literally, but more importantaly, how she felt in her soul, magical and violent and funny, filled with passion, and like it contained some ancient element that was invisible from the outside.

Skels: A Novel

United States

Soft Skull

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