Hand over Heart: Poems 1981-1988

Literature & Fiction

Trinidad, David

Poetry

Amethyst Pr

November

Hanuman Books

Three Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

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

Notes on a Past Life

BlazeVOX Books

Whether chronicling 1960s sitcoms or the murder of Sharon Tate at the hand of Charles Manson's family, this collection of Trinidad's poetry explores popular American cultural themes, and delves deep into the fears that haunt so many suburban lives.

Answer Song

Serpent's Tail

Hand Over Heart

“A triumph, a contemporary satyrican.”—D.A. Powell
This three-way, groundbreaking, e-mail deconstruction of All About Eve is a treasure-trove of poetic forms, cinephile gossip and literary visitations.

Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse

Crosbie, Lynn

Conway, Jeffery

Contemporary

Turtle Point Press

"Plasticville is about the bliss of collecting, invention, and valuing the bits and pieces of popular detritus that constitute our lives. . . . Trinidad's warm intelligence makes poetry deft and true, dazzling and vulnerable, plastic and classic."—Molly Peacock

Plasticville

United States

“Deeply personal, yet coolly postmodern, no other writer besides David Trinidad makes the interface between our private memories and our cultural ones seem so seamless. Variously giddy, gossipy, melancholy, obsessive, and euphoric, Trinidad's voice has an amazing plasticity as he slips between genres and forms, tradition and invention, with assurance and grace. The Late Show is a unique collection of interlocking facets: part literary memoir, part film encyclopedia, part shrine and memento mori—and always undeniably, pure poem.”—Elaine Equi
“A beautiful study in detail and devotion. . . . Frame by frame this book is a tremendously engaging, soulful read.”—Anselm Berrigan

The Late Show: Poems

This suburban California coming of age navigates Trinidad’s personal history in the shadow of Hollywood, against the dramas of the 1960s and ’70s.\n“Trinidad’s pieces teach us how memory and history are forms of yearning, and about what can and cannot be recovered.” —Amy Gerstler 
“This is the writing of a poet who loves the world into language.” —Aaron Smith 
Poet David Trinidad’s past is rich fodder for a collection of memory pieces that wind the reader through the underbelly of 1960s and ’70s America—and Southern California, more specifically. In Trinidad’s recollections, the proximity to Hollywood both glamorizes and condemns the bustling suburbs. Stains of the Manson murders and adoration for The Boys in the Band are documented with the same care as fascinations with Barbie dolls and twelve-cent comic books. The struggles of an awkward gay teenager meld into the weighty anecdotes of a young man who befriends famous writers, acts as a historian for familial legacies, and confronts the limitations of desire. 
The title piece, “Digging to Wonderland,” presents a young David Trinidad and his friend Nancy as they tunnel into the ground of her backyard, in search of the next great adventure. Ultimately, we witness a childhood spent under the threat of annihilation: “So the ‘twinkly lights’ in the hills above Chatsworth were actually missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And without knowing it, I grew up under their spell.”

Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces

Genre Fiction

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Books by Trinidad, David