ROMANCE WITH SMALL-TIME CROOKS by Alexis Ivy

I'm in love with Alexis Ivy's Romance with Small-Time Crooks. Don't get me wrong. Nothing in this romance is pretty, or easy. None of the edges are smoothed. And that's what I love. She looks, clear-eyed and unapologetic, at the detours her life has taken, as she tried to save herself through drugs and sex, tried to ""save the broken down, my heavy load, my sole responsibility."" There are elegies to those who didn't make it--my favorite is the gritty sestina, Truth Is--and, ultimately, a quiet celebration of survival, not in any nirvana, but ""up from where I've been."" Read it for the honesty. Read it for the language. Read it for a story that grabs you, shakes you up, and won't let go.

—Wendy Mnookin, Author of The Moon Makes It’s Own Plea

Alexis Ivy's jagged, hoarse, and beautiful poems recount a journey through a hell that looks a lot like honky-tonk America: the drugs, the booze, the sex— and the promise of transcendence everywhere just out of reach. These are the poems of a survivor who sheds her delusions, poem by poem, as she investigates her life with honesty and courage and a poetic gift that comes damn close to redeeming it all—redeeming us all. There is nothing small-time about Romance With Small-Time Crooks. It is an extraordinary book.

—Richard Hoffman, Author of Emblem

The poems in this stunning collection have dignity, complexity, and a truly distinctive voice—half streetwise, half eloquent—and they form a saga about a young woman who says she likes “language to rub me raw” and leaves home saying “O, the mess I’ll get me into”--and she does. She hangs out with small-time crooks, learns to throw knives, burns black tar heroin over a silver spoon. She gambles and loses friends to homicide and overdose. By the end comes revelation. Alexis Ivy is no “accidental hero”, in this original work, she creates “tragedies just to overcome them.”

—Grey Held, Author of Two Star General

Alexis Ivy is a student of literature at Harvard University. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Main Street Rag, Tar River Poetry, Eclipse, and J Journal. She has worked in the kitchen of a homeless shelter, invented names for wallpaper designs, served as poetry editor of Coin Flip Shuffle, and is the operations manager for Poem Works: Workshop for Publishing Poets. She grew up in Boston Massachusetts, and currently lives there.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-105-4