I’ve lived in Denver for twenty-eight years, and my first exposure to the literary life was through the Denver spoken word scene at places like the Mercury Café, but my true allegiance is to the creative underground (which knows no state) and the years I spent at college and grad school enabled my acquaintance with talented writers of poetry and prose from all over the country and the whole world, many of whom are now freelancers like myself or adjunct faculty somewhere, and a few of whom have gone on to mainstream literary success. Lauren Tivey is the most recent of my former classmates to publish. Her The Breakdown Atlas and Other Poems, published by Big Table Publishing as part of its Chapbook Series, available through their website, narrates her own uprootedness, from Galveston to Asia, where she traveled last year for an extended stay as a teacher. Tivey takes us from the punk rock anti-romance of Crazy Bob with devils in the seat of his brain, complicated by someone named Dog Face with a Betty Page haircut, through Galveston, past memories of highways,truckstops and trailer parks, and in a poem called “Inferno of the body”, to a Day of the Dead festival “at the Mercado de las Brujas” [“market of the witches” en Ingles], where “revelers purchase marigolds, candy skulls, and bread-children, to cart to the graves of the Valle de Flores.” [Valley of Flowers] as a “hitchhiker . . . who knows hours are limited, and how fitting, to meet her end in a volcanic crater, in the neat bowl of La Paz" to a single line capturing perfectly the voice and vision of the mother attending her own daughter’s birthgiving after her own past faults of motherhood in : “You’re better at this than I ever imagined.” The first Asian reference, a mention of Hong Kong, occurs in the title poem in the book's latter portion and Asian references recur until the end of this collection with the rare wonderful exception, “The Cottage,” which references a Gaelic homeland, Madagascar, the Carolinas and Vegas Every piece is individually imbued, and the whole book collectively, by the enhanced sensation of travel into foreign zones as an outsider. You have to use your whole mind. But like the creative underground, what we make of ourselves knows no state.“We carry it wherever we go.”
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