Straightforward, no-nonsense poetry about being Black, female and gay.

At age nineteen, author Teri OShea joined Peoples Temple in California led by Jim Jones. A member for seven years, she escaped Peoples Temple three weeks before the massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. The raw and powerful poems in Jonestown Lullaby explore her experience in Jonestown and the aftermath of her survival. A personal confidant to Jim Jones for seven years, OShea writes about the harrowing nightmare of Jonestown with an intensity and passion seldom captured in poetic form. Teri was the last person to escape Peoples Temple before the massacre in Jonestown; now, she turns to writing to help find her way back to a more peaceful life. Jonestown Lullaby records her voyage, with vivid, stark images of the bewildering world that was Jonestown and the pathological madness of Jim Jones. Teri includes photographs of some of the Peoples Temple members who lived and lost their lives there; revealing an aspect of Jonestown rarely seen. This is her tribute to those who died so tragically. I Write I write from the poor side of silence Of an unholy priesthood that Captured my soul for a time These poems Neither confession nor biography Follow the voyage of a lonely spirit Into a realm where there are no answers

The main poem in this book is the story of the Jonestown massacre which took place in Guyana in 1978. It is related in poetic form so as to lend greater emphasis to the incidents that led up to tragedy and attempts to portray the effect it had on the lives of the members of the commune before it occurred. Shorter poems of the loss of love are also included.

Jonestown Remembered is a poem about those who lost their lives as a result of the machinations of one individual who sought to direct the lives of some 912 persons in an isolated region of Guyana during the period of 1976 to 1978. Having formed the Peoples Temple in California, he transferred his activities to a country that was anxious to accommodate him without reserve or supervision. His name was Jim Jones. He felt that his view on how life was to be lived was unique and admired the socialist ideology. But all was not well with the administration of the community, which eventually climaxed with the deaths by suicide and murder of all its members save a few who had escaped. The poem seeks to recount the trials of the occupants of the Temple, their sense of abandonment at having been removed from the comfort and camaraderie of their friends, and their feelings of impotence to do anything about it. But still, for some, this experience was a deliverance from a much worse condition of life that they had experienced in the US. These felt that they owed allegiance to their leader, who had made their lives worthwhile for the first time. The poem seeks to explore both these responses and how the final sacrifice or deliverance was accomplished. Other poems of tragic loss are included in the book that suggests that life is not always a bed of roses; that the joy and happiness derived from love is often a prelude to tragedy and sorrow. That the love and contentment derived from a life well spent will come to an end, inevitably, with the final parting, and loved ones are left in their solitude.

Winner of the 2011 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.

Haunted by the People's Temple tragedy, Fraser Sutherland has, in this extraordinary long poem, reconstructed Jonestown in all its horror and dark comedy, as well as the career of its monstrous architect. Like a cracked mirror image of Christ, the shadow of Jones falls on every page—a hollow man who could not live outside the din of his own voice, a voice that Sutherland renders in the third person. Tracking Jones's perverse pilgrimage from Indiana to California to Guyana, Sutherland shows him melting at the edges so he becomes only a blundering instrument of control, a social chameleon, a monkey in the jungle.

Between the long title poem and the other poems in the collection, Michael Gilkes sets up a dialogue about the nature of memory and the meaning of experience across time.