Overview

This is a collection of character sketches, vignettes and stories from the streets and neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Told from a wryly askance, ground level perspective, this anthology presents portrayals of gritty, everyday people. Some are quirky. Some obtuse. Some resistant. Some resilient. All real people. All scuffling to get by with a hard way to go. These are narratives of relationship clashes, urban life struggles, hardscrabble conflicts and vivid personalities retold by a man who heard it all first hand. The author, Paul Bukovec, spent forty-five years as a psychotherapist evaluating and treating a wide spectrum of the population in the City of Brotherly Love. He worked at the local state mental hospital, a community mental health center, and as lead clinician/director for the city's first Batterers' Intervention Program. He engaged with folks at all levels of distress and conflict: evaluated court referrals, diagnosed cases at every level of disorder, and spoke intimately with thousands from all walks of life. Bukovec describes the poems in this volume as mosaics. He has taken fragments from hundreds of personalities and a myriad of stories he listened to over the years and pieced together composites that tell tales about real people you could encounter any day on Philly's always sunny streets.

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Reviews

A kind of a portrait gallery of characters at risk...The book contains many surprises and much suspense... Poetically, the power of the poems lies in the scope and depth of inner lives that are loosely tethered outer worlds-often indifferent and violent. We see how trauma and insecurity set them up to create the very worlds that victimize them... At other times, lives seem like accumulations of accidents-devoid of opportunity or love... So, the base note of the collection seems to me to be traumatized individuals at odds with the threatening worlds they inhabit. This is not to say that the characters are all victims. There is a wide variety of endings as characters attempt to make sense of, and find themselves in, their worlds. The poems often portray them as active agents trying to make the most of things-taking one decision after another in an attempt to find a place. ...This variety of fates creates an atmosphere of suspense throughout the book, as you never can quite anticipate how a given piece will end. As a reader, this uncertainty pulled me into the text. It picked up momentum as it went along. Formal things that worked for me: compression of language that sums up a lot of personal history in a very short space (masterful), urban imagery gives credibility to the work, lots of suspense in the narratives (surprise too), energy in the violence, short lines that carry the action. Bill Van Buskirk, Author of The Poet's Pocket Guide to Steady Employment and This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law

Author Information

The author, Paul Bukovec, spent some forty years as a psycho-therapist evaluating and treating a wide spectrum of the population in the City of Brotherly Love. He worked at the local state mental hospital, a community mental health center, and as lead clinician/director for the city's first Batterers' Intervention Program. He engaged with folks at all levels of distress and conflict: evaluated court referrals, diagnosed cases at every level of disorder, and spoke intimately with thousands from all walks of life.

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