David Trinidad

David Trinidad

David Trinidad is the author of Sleeping with Bashō, Digging to Wonderland, and Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, and Divining Poets: Dickinson, an Emily Dickinson tarot deck. Trinidad lives in Los Angeles.

New Playlist

Poems

New Playlist holds a variety of poetic forms: odes, found, haiku, prose, list, collages, one-liners, sonnets, and more. With his trademark wit and inventiveness, David Trinidad “plays” with these forms as if they were toys. He creates a Wikipedia cento in which each line illustrates how little is known of sixty-five ancient Greek poets. He gives us an itinerary of “Things to Do” in ten 1970’s disaster films. He catalogs Sylvia Plath’s recipe cards and all the references to beer in a book by Bernadette Mayer. His subjects are as “fun” as his forms: pop singer Dusty Springfield, Marcel Proust, Bashō, Hollywood movies and actresses, old cartoons, a prom dress thief loose in a girls’ dorm. But “play” does not preclude seriousness, as Trinidad addresses physical scars, encounters with homophobia, and the wonders and wounds of childhood.