La Loca is at a high pitch in these confessional and ecstatic outbursts made famous by her performances on tour from New York to Australia. She was one of four American writers chosen to represent the United States at the 1988 Winter Olympics Arts Festival in Calgary, Canada. La Loca grew up in impoverished Chicano districts of Los Angeles and now lives in Hollywood, California. "To watch this kinetic portrait of sass and blood and fire and gentle weeping is to wonder if an eggshell shaved translucent could be more fragile then her soul." Itabari Njeri, Los Angeles Times "What this dynamite young woman does is use her keen intelligence, lacerating wit and bold sincerity to transform the ugly, the mundane, the painful into a poetry of substance and joy. Simply wonderful." Wanda Coleman

Since 1955, City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco has published over 230 titles and its 1,500 authors include Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Hilda Doolittle, Allen Ginsberg, Goethe, Walt Whitman, Gregory Corso, and Karl Marx. Provides complete information on all City Lights publications from 1955 through 1990.

Drew Barret is about to start a new school after being suspended from his last one for fighting. He hopes he can survive the semester without running into bullies or becoming one himself, but his fiery temper keeps getting him into trouble. When he's snatched away from the lake near his home by a mythical monster, he finds himself trapped in a fantastical world, held captive by a maniacal beast, putting his true nature to the test. With his family and best friend, Trev, venturing into the world of Aqualor to find him, he relies on their support to help the Arvaks, Winged-Groshin and Lamera find peace and freedom in their homeland. Together, they experience a wild adventure and witness Drew's journey of self-discovery as he battles to control the rage within him. Return to Isle of the Shallows is a gripping, coming-of-age, fantasy adventure which addresses many themes specific to teens--anger, love, grief, courage, friendship, and belonging among others. Its most prominent theme is anger with an underlying theme of love and respect.

A mosaic of lyrical vignettes, at once deeply personal and political, set against the turbulent backdrop of Arab/Western relations. Adnan writes, "Contrary to what is usually believed, it is not general ideas and grandiose unfolding of great events that impress the mind during times of heightened historic upheavals, but rather the uninterrupted flow of little experiences, observations, disturbances, small ecstasies, or barely perceptible discouragements that make up day-to-day living." Etel Adnan, a Lebanese American poet, painter, and essayist, lives in Paris, Beirut, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Among her books, the novel Sitt Marie Rose is considered a classic of Middle Eastern literature. She has been a powerful voice for compassion and empowerment in feminist and antiwar movements.

With one suitcase and a map drawn on a bar napkin as her only guide, sixteen-year old Loren travels to Moron del la Frontera in Andalusia to learn to play flamenco guitar from the Gypsies. Here she joins an extended family of flamenco artists and foreign aficionados whose adventures over a twenty-year period are interwoven with Loren’s own odyssey. Her life with the Gypsies is haunted by the mysterious circumstances of her brother Aaron’s death. Although they shared the same New York Jewish upbringing, he went to California during the expansive optimism of the sixties, while she went back in time to explore a rich music and culture. Their relationship is a dark love story that casts disquieting shadows over their years apart. As Loren struggles to master an instrument traditionally off-limits to women, she finds her own path, inspired by the earthy wisdom of her Gypsy companions. "This stunning first novel is the story of a journey from America to Andalusia, where a community of Gypsies has inhabited a musical and poetic tradition so intensely and for so long that the nature of reality is transformed for all those they encounter. In this landscape even the buildings are capable of passion."-The Nation ". . . fascinating insights into Gypsy culture.” — Los Angeles Times Dorien Ross studied flamenco guitar with Andalusian Gypsies. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays and in Tikkun.

In the activist verse of this poetic warrior, always committed, the actual world is never out of mind, even in his most intimate poems. Kabbalist, populist, and communist, Hirschman has published over sixty books of his own poetry, and this representative selection is a cross-section of his poetic output, spanning many years and mutations. When he reads aloud, the words take fire, and on the page they crackle and spark. Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some forty-five translations from a half a dozen languages, as well the editor of anthologies and journals.