Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces

by David Trinidad

Overview

This suburban California coming of age navigates Trinidad’s personal history in the shadow of Hollywood, against the dramas of the 1960s and ’70s.

“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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933527284
Publisher:	Turtle Point Press
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Trinidad is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, collaborations, and edited volumes. These include Swinging on a Star, Notes on a Past Life, Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, and Plasticville, finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Trinidad is editor of Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith and A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, which won a Lambda Literary Award. He is a professor of poetry at Columbia College, Chicago.

Table of Contents

Kevin from Heaven 1

My Pea Coat 2

On Overland 4

Confession 6

Rabbit Hole 8

On Vacation from the Death Camp 10

Guardian Angels 11

Politics and the News 12

Remnant 14

Proustian 16

The Movie of Her Life 18

Pink and Black 22

Drunk Dream 23

Hidden 24

In the late fifties, 25

Anyta 26

In the Midst of Grief 28

First Death in Sierra Madre 29

Palinode 32

Why, today, do I think of Mary, 36

Ray Donovan 37

Not Just in Memory 39

Opal 41

Winona Ryder 44

Freewrite after Breathing, Last Class, 12/11/18 45

"The Happiest Place on Earth" 46

Last Poem 48

David Trinidads 50

Memoir 52

Joanne Kyger 55

"Ordinary Time" 58

1968 61

Digging to Wonderland 63

That Was Allen 65

Mystery House Magnet 69

My Mother's Love Letters 73

An Attempt at Exhausting a Neighborhood in Chatsworth, California 78

Coda: "Twinkly Lights" 107

Bobby 108

Harlen 117

Mart Crowley 121

My Comic Book Collection 124

Brothers Five 131

Grace 133

Editorial Reviews

Street names, board games, celebrities, old photos, TV shows, films, songs, fashion, the experience of growing up gay: all these and more are grist for David Trinidad’s mill. Trinidad’s poems are meticulous, confessional, elegiac, gossipy, sensitive, and playful. Their poignance and beauty teach us how memory and history are forms of yearning, and about what can and cannot be recovered.”

—Amy Gerstler, author of Dearest Creature and Bitter Angel

“Digging to Wonderland is an intimate and searching record of indelible marks and ephemeral impressions left behind as we pass through time’s borrowed apartments. Soul-searching, researching, and vividly reliving, Trinidad’s poems are bent on self-knowledge. . . . Who’s not a houseguest in this life we don’t get to keep? And what do any of us carefully and carelessly leave behind as we travel though?”

—Robyn Schiff, author of A Woman of Property

“Trinidad honors the lonely moments, the new lusts, and the unrequited dreams of those we know intimately and of those we once knew who vanished. This is poetry at the glittering edge of form; this is the writing of a poet who loves the world into language. When David Trinidad searches through the pink, blurred days of the past, he finds not only himself, but all of us."

—Aaron Smith, author of Appetite

“Conversational and confessional, [Digging to Wonderland] reveal[s] the compelling narrative voice of Trinidad, a born raconteur whose ease has been polished by a lifetime of practiced study.”

—Foreword Reviews

From the Publisher