These are the true-life adventures of a woman who ranges over four continents, endeavoring to go beyond the limits of ordinary life. Recovering from an accident, she goes to Glastonbury, where she finds energy portrayed in ancient earthworks as a snake coiled in concentric circles around a hill. To walk this spiral is called threading the maze, which means both to ascend and to go deep within. This becomes a guiding emblem of her pilgrimages to sites of female spiritual and temporal power, from the Irish countryside to the Amazon jungle to the high mountain cultures of Nepal.
"Fascinating people, places, and landscapes come alive at the touch of Vega's observant eye and open heart. Tracking the Serpent takes the reader on an exciting journey, as cultural exploration ignites dramatic self-discovery and spiritual insight." Miranda Shaw
"With poetry one line, in prose a steady mind. Vega learned from poetry how to use details, with prose, to keep track of time. I really respect this book." Gregory Corso
"In these remarkable accounts, full of color and suspense, Vega carries us along on the strength of her own urgency to places few of us will ever see for ourselves. An informative guide and a brave one, she never ceases to question her own assumptions. For the armchair traveler, these are splendid excursions." Hettie Jones
Janine Pommy Vega, Beat Generation writer, performer, and musician, is the author of twelve books. For many years she has worked with Poets in the Schools, and she is a member of PEN’s Prison Writing Committee.

Tracking the Serpent: Journeys into Four Continents

Vega, Janine Pommy

Religion & Spirituality

City Lights Publishers

Voices Under The Harvest Moon: An Anthology Of Writing From Eastern Correctional Facility

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Segue Foundation

Drunk on a Glacier: Talking to Flies

History & Criticism

Tooth of Time Books

Janine Pommy Vega is the archetypal New York Beat. Her poetry is intelligent and politically aware, and her performances in English and in Spanish, with and without music are intense, incantatory. Her writings are also intensely autobiographical, following closely in the footsteps of her life-journey: they are the poetic record of her experience-hungry travels through the world and her spiritual retreats into herself; her work with public school children and delinquent youth, and with the inmates and staff of the New York State prison system; her friendships and her love affairs, her farewells and her lingering memories. For this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing. The result is "an honest and passionate road map to her soul," said the American Book Review, "a book describing one poet's life as a pilgrimage toward herself. It is an exhilarating trip."

Mad Dogs of Trieste: New & Selected Poems

POMMY-VEGA, Janine

Black Sparrow Press

Janine Pommy Vega writes with quiet command of her life and times and of our shared American present. Here are protests against the depravities of the prison system, political poems grounded in closely observed human particulars. Here too are tender lyrics about family, lovers, and friends; celebrations of the natural and domestic worlds of upstate New York; and remarkably vivid letters home from spiritual sojourns through Italy, Germany, and the former Yugoslavia. “Vega’s poems reflect a deeply felt and aching knowledge. They ‘go’ (as Kerouac said) their own patient, unadorned, and dignified way,” wrote Publishers Weekly of her previous collection, Mad Dogs of Trieste.

The Green Piano

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Books by Vega, Janine Pommy