Love on the Streets

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.

More Praise

Praise for South America Mi Hija:"Doubiago continues to stake a claim to being one of America's most vigorous and ambitious poets. This is rich, intense, enchanting work."

Booklist

Praise for South America Mi Hija:"This is a remarkable poem-of-ideas-ideas that are provocative, insightful. A classic feminist text."

Belles Lettres

Praise for South America Mi Hija:"There is no more vivid book than South America Mi Hija. There is no more immediate poem. Hers is not a poetry of imagery. Nor, in a strict sense, a lyric poetry. Her poetry is narrative by nature and epic by intent, and it achieves its state of white-hot imagination because Sharon Doubiago meets life so imaginatively."

LA Weekly

Sharon Doubiago's Love on the Streets, her selected and new poems, brings together evidence of her power that feels raw but is carefully honed, her rootedness in the American land and experience, her strong female voice. These are poems with real bite. They will move you if you let them.

Marge Piercy

Sharon Doubiago is projective: her poetic 'I' is a woman arrived in full determination, after generations of female oppression, celebrating the receptions and shapings and birthings of the story of her soul in poems. A grand and powerful selection by one of America's best.

Jack Hirschman, San Francisco Poet Laureate

If the true poet's subject is love, Sharon Doubiago may be the truest poet we have. In her wide and deep and unflinching vision, the love poem expands and expands, transcends all borders and laws, becomes historical and political and mythic, epic and cosmic, merges the erotic and the spiritual, the tender and the violent, breaks the heart open again and again.

Cecilia Woloch

These are poems about love: the love between two people, the love of one's country, and love of the very land, among other tributes. . . .It's rare to find such earnest poems about love that are so finely sculpted.

The Feminist Review

From the meanest of streets to the most ivory of towers, Sharon Doubiago has been knocking on our doors with an insistent and consistent voice for decades. This new selection of Doubiago's poems puts the best of her work between one set of covers along with mold-breaking new poems.

Rain Taxi

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