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“Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance puts a moving, human face on addiction in America, a problem that we as a society and individually can no longer dismiss as someone else’s business."
—Califano, Chairman and President, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
"Here is the poetry of affliction and addiction—wonderfully crafted, fierce, pure, sly, subtle, poignant and alarming. Here are the truths of desire, suffering, and possibility, a multitude of voices that reflect, in such a variety of ways, about the experience of the self's enslavement to that wich is most self-destructive. Last Call is truly a fine collection: I know of no other like it."
—Maggie Scarf, author of Intimate Worlds: Life inside the Family
Last Call is a diverse gathering of contemporary poems focused on the heartbreaking and profound matter of substance abuse. The addict’s persona is represented, but many poems also approach addiction from the unexpected but equally suffering point of view of family members and friends. And there is a wide variety of tone struck by the poets; humor and irony, for example, prove valuable entrances to this most serious topic. While the book does not turn away from the grim realities of addiction, there is a redemptive power and shine to these poems—there is hope at night’s end, after Last Call.
Jeffrey Skinner is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. His published collections of poetry include The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), and A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was a National Poetry Series selection. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Kentucky Council on the Arts. His poems appear regularly in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Georgia Review.
Sarah Gorham is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sarabande Books. Her second collection of poems The Tension Zone won the 1996 Four Way Books Award in Poetry, judged by Heather McHugh Her first full-length collection of poems, Don’t Go Back to Sleep (Galileo Press, 1989) was nominated for a Pushcart in 1990 and she also has a chapbook The Night Lifted Us (Larkspur Press1991). In 2003, Four Way Books will publish her third collection of poetry The Cure. Gorham’s poems have been published widely in such magazines as Poetry, The Nation, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, Grand Street, DoubleTake, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ohio Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, where in 1990 she won the Carolyn Kizer Award.
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