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First published by West End Press in 1982, this book-length poem about a journey across America has been out of print for a decade but has maintained its underground reputation as a major response to the male epic consciousness of twentieth-century American poetry.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "My soul looks back," James Baldwin said, "and wonders how I got over." Volume two of Sharon Doubiago's memoir, MY FATHER'S LOVE, reveals the legacy of her father's sexual and psychological abuse that continued throughout his life and the toxic effects it has had on the lives of everyone in the family. How family secrets ripple through succeeding generations with devastating results, how family myths become more powerful than truth, how they are maintained at any cost, and how denial blinds us to what we do not want to, or cannot bear to see. Most of us never realize we are in denial but Doubiago is not most of us, for she is a poet of exceptional power and insight. This is a book about all of us, how we deceive ourselves and others, believe what we want to believe, what we are conditioned to believe, how we are, as R. D. Laing put it, "destroying ourselves with violence masquerading as love." America collectively is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. MY FATHER'S LOVE helps us "to get over."

The author of this book-length poem has spent much of her life travelling the Americas. Her previous books include the epic poem Hard Country, Psyche Drives the Coast: Poems 1975-1987, and two collections of stories, The Book of Seeing with One's Own Eyes and El Nino.

She sounds like Kerouac or someone, like really good. The energy but it's more the details, precise details. Doubiago sees things, she notices things in the middle of these crisis moments. Allen Ginsberg

Love on the Streets is a selection from two of Doubiago's book-length poems, Hard Country and South America Mi Hija and from the collections Psyche Drives the Coast and Body and Soul, plus new poems. Hard Country takes place in 1976, on a journey across the U.S. with a lover, climaxing on the lake where his mother drowned herself when he was ten. South America Mi Hija is a journey the poet made with her 15 year-old daughter to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Psyche Drives the Coast are poems written while Doubiago lived mainly on the road, and in diverse, passionate communities of poets from Mendocino to the Canadian border. Body and Soul was written while she was a resident of Oregon, and the new poems are written from her present home in San Francisco.

Poems by Sharon DoubiaGO

Poetry. THE VISIT is not only a major artistic achievement, but an important story / history about injustice, the corruption and abuse of power, and the devastation it wreaks on individuals, cultures and classes, and the corrosive influences it has not only on the victims—the minorities and the helpless—but upon those who wield power and dominate and define the ruling culture. And, as always, it is the children who suffer the most. It is a careful, complex and brilliant examination / cross-examination of one man's horrific journey from abused child to incarcerated prisoner of the very system that abused him and later convicted him of a crime he claims he did not commit. Guilty or innocent is not the issue here so much as the perversion of power and systemic abuse of those who are helpless against the dominant Church and State.

Poetry. NAKED TO THE EARTH is a wide-ranging, lyrical, jarring, playful, elegiac, dissonant, amazing quest to understand who we are and how we became who we are. This book will make you think--deeply and profoundly--about relationships, culture, obligation (to ourselves and others, those we love and those we may not love but should), violence and war. It is as reflective and thought- provoking, as lyrically beautiful as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and as searing an indictment of our past and present as Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States. This book is the distillation of a lifetime by a poet who has personally experienced injustice and the misuse of power, but has not given anyone the power to make her hate. It is the work of a master poet in complete control of her craft, looking back, looking forward, reflecting on life and the human condition, distilling it to its essence so that she--and we--can see with clarity the beauty, the commonality and the inter- connectedness in all of us as we travel through our history, to make sense of it, the world we have created, the world we inhabit, and our place in it.